Fixing targets and evaluating design alternatives by pairwise comparisons – The COMPARE method

As soon as the products to design must not only deliver pure services but have also to exhibit esteem or subjective functions such as aesthetics, style, cultural values and ergonomic considerations, both individual and group product evaluations as well as product specification are difficult issues. Indeed, for both design tasks, designers must qualify the expected properties of a product and find relevant measurement scales to quantify them. In this paper, we propose a design method named COMPARE for understanding the perception of existing products (before starting the creation process), for defining the specifications for a new product and, finally, for evaluating the emerging design concepts under the expected properties (perceptual attributes). The originality of this method is to be based on elementary and qualitative Pairwise Comparisons of products under given perceptual attributes (and also further Principal Component Analysis). It results in two fundamental properties of userfriendliness for the designer and easiness for automatically generate measurement scales under perceptual attributes. The COMPARE method has been experimented on the analysis and the design of automotive dashboards.