Human-centered design for automotive styling design: Conceptualizing a car from QFD to ViP

Designing a vehicle is a harmonic balancing between engineering functions, technologies, and designing activities. However, the design process is laborious because the convergence between styling and engineering needs to find constant compromises. Using a human-centered design strategy improves the management of the process. Considering this, the paper reports an automotive design process that is a part of a multidisciplinary project funded by Emilia Romagna Region, Italy. The main goal of the overall project is to design the concept of a hybrid sport vehicle. The peculiarity of this specific research concerns the combination of two different approaches that rely on the importance of human-centered design. In particular, The process initially uses Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and it concludes the styling process through Vision in Product Design (ViP). The result converges both outcomes to come up with a novel and integrated concept solution.