A deck of cards to help track design trends to assist the creation of new products

Abstract

The more competition becomes important, the more companies need to innovate in order to survive. This requires creative, adaptable, strategic intelligence ability. We will focus here on the latter capacity and particularly on knowledge acquisition for anticipating product design changes and recognizing opportunities as well as threats related to possible innovations. To do this, we propose to focus on the search for and the identification of signals that allow us to identify trends and design constants to interpret some of them as opportunities or threats of disruptive innovations in product design. The specificity of our proposition is about a knowledge acquisition system that used a physical card game as a tool for data collection. The data collection is based on common points recognized in images during several games of a card deck that are not always played by the same people. Its drawback is that it requires manual indexing of the collected data and a paper printout of the cards. We have tested the feasibility of using this type of collection with students, which we also discuss in this paper.