Patterns of Tacit Knowledge Based on Ethnography in Product Design

LUO Shijian   WENG Jianguang

(College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027)

Abstract: From industrial design, an approach of ethnography is proposed to study users’ and designers’ patterns of tacit knowledge in product design. The concepts of ethnography are introduced and the relation between ethnography and product design is explored. Taken the existed portable media center form design as an example, semantic differential, image scale and conjoint analysis etc are employed to investigate the acquiring and representing of users’ and designers’ tacit knowledge. The two-dimensional perceptual image spaces of the portable media center form are established, and the tacit knowledge patterns are presented. The results show that many differences exist between users’ and designers’ tacit knowledge representation of the same objects and their interpretations of the same image-words, and it is necessary to adopt user-centered method to study users’ tacit knowledge and find out the commonness and individualities during the product design process.

Key words: Product design  Ethnography  Semantic differential  Factor analysis  Conjoint analysis

CLC No: TH166 TP14

国家自然科学基金(60503068)、国家高技术研究发展计划(863计划, 2006AA04Z103)、浙江省自然科学基金(Y104256)和浙江省教育厅(20061352)资助项目. Received 20070526, received in revised form 20070910

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