Managing Life-Based Design as Micro-Innovation Process

Technology development is changing where it is possible to master hundreds of thousands of functionalities with one single device. The design of targets of use and purposes for technologies has thus become an increasingly important issue in industrial design, where the innovative value can be found increasingly often in new ways of using technologies rather than in developing new technical artifacts. To succeed in this field of front-end design, understanding of people’s lives should be the real starting point of the design. Therefore, it is essential to create the kinds of design practices which can guide the concept design on the ground of knowledge about human life. This kind of design and innovation thinking, which emphasizes the importance of understanding people’s lives (forms of life, values and circumstances) as a basis for the creation of design ideas and for concept design, is called Life-Based Design. In LifeBased Design, ontology-based systems are needed to guide innovation management processes. These can be created by means of micro-innovation research, which analyses innovation as a form of human thinking.