Human-centered design and quality function deployment: Understanding needs on a multidisciplinary automotive research

The paper reports the activities of a specific design research integrated into multidisciplinary automotive project funded by Emilia Romagna region, Italy. The main goal of the overall project is to design the concept of a high-performance vehicle. In particular, this contribution presents a qualitative user analysis that has been carried out specifically to design the vehicle interface. This work lays on a methodology that points out the importance of inclusive and human-centered design approaches that are used throughout the automotive product development. The Quality Function Deployment (QFD), namely an inclusive decision-making tool, has been utilized into the product planning process in order to obtain measurable design parameters for improving the quality of the expected project through a correlation with the user needs. The outputs derived by QFD tool are used as a strategy to develop a possible design solution for the vehicle interface.