Environment: The First Thing to Look at in Conceptual Design

This paper aims to addresses three questions related to conceptual design: 1) Why is environment important? 2) What is environment? and 3) How to analyze environment? Unlike product-, function (affordance)-, or user-centered methodologies, it is argued that the known environment of a product to be designed must be the first thing to be looked at in a conceptual design. The environment can be categorized into three types: the natural, the built and the human. A complete set of environment for a design is implied in the lifecycle of a product to be designed, which can be further defined by lifecycle activities in terms of time. The analysis of environment consists of three activities: 1) determine decision directions by asking design questions based on a design problem statement; 2) clarify the design problem statement by answering questions following the decision direction; and 3) formulate an environment system from a design problem statement. The process is driven by asking the right questions by analyzing the ROM diagram of the design problem statement. The answers to the questions follow the lifecycle analysis of the product and its environment components. This paper completes a detailed procedure for Environment Analysis, which is the one of the three activities in Environment-Based Design (EBD).