Teaching aspiring industrial designers to understand value(s)

This chapter describes ‘Understanding Values’, a course that teaches aspiring designers who aim to design for values to disentangle how different notions of value and values influence the design process, the design outcome, and how the outcome is evaluated. The course strives to make abstract values more tangible by asking students to analyse the values supported or hindered by an existing product-service system and how it brings or destroys value for a broad range of direct and indirect stakeholders. Various theories, methods and tools are brought forward to help them perform their analysis and come up with a more acceptable alternative value proposition. Students are also encouraged to conduct high-quality dialogues to reflect on their own values as designers, the ethics of design and the value tensions they experience during the course. These reflections in turn serve as input for the development of their own code of ethics.
Marketing and Consumer Research