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talk & workshop | reboot11

Bye-bye Homo Oeconomicus - Welcome intuition & emotion

Collaborative intuition at work for better products

Some say, making Products is an Art. Others say, it's pure Craft. Others may find it's a Science. What do you think? Whatever we may know one day: In the end, it's all for the end user.

This session invites everyone with an interest in product design approaches to take a look at recent progress, and try some ideas with a real case together during the session.

You design a fantastic new product, hoping to touch right on people's heart and soul. The question is, what happens in the mind of your user while they decide if they like it?

There's much deeper understanding available now what makes people "appreciate" a product. How does this help us develop better collaborative approaches to product design?

Good old "homo oeconomicus" for long has dominated much of Western thinking on how people take economic decisions: rational; fully informed; slightly hindered by emotions. Some of us always felt that this can't be "it". So the good news is: There's good news.

Since a few years, we know better. Experimental research has given us fantastic insights what makes human minds "appreciate" a product. Actually, we might be in the midst of a veritable paradigm shift in our understanding of emotions and decision making. In designing real-world products, we are called now to start putting much more emphasis on intuition, expectations, and emotions -- this feels a bit more suitable to us humans than being modeled as Mr Spock.

So far in the "real" world outside academia, though, these useful results have often had remarkably limited impact on product design and development. And the question is: What is in our way? And: how, actually, do _we_ take our own design decisions?

In the first part, let's review some research findings and conclusions for product decisionmaking. In the second part, let's try some together and sketch a new product - for ourselves as the users.