Human-Centered Design and Automotive: developing a hybrid concept car with Quality Function Deployment

The paper reports the design process of specific research that is integrated into a multidisciplinary project funded by Emilia Romagna Region, Italy, in the field of Automotive. The main goal of the overall project is to design the future concept of a hybrid sports vehicle through the definition of its architecture and styling. The research is divided into five macro areas in which this specific contribution is addressed to design principles and methods. In particular, this activity focuses its attention on human-centered design methodology, which utilizes the expectations of end-users to lead the entire product development process. Therefore, the contribution presents a specific user analysis that is carried out through Quality Function Deployment (QFD). It is an inclusive decision-making tool that is utilized during the conceptual phase to translate costumer demand into a desirable product. QFD is based on a bi-dimensional mathematical matrix that represents graphically the correlation between the most important needs of end-users and the product characteristics that are more significant to develop suitable solutions for solving the main problems those people. Indeed, QFD provides a qualitative design strategy that can be used within the automotive development program to obtain measurable design parameters, which successively permit to improve the overall quality of the expected final result. In the end, the outcomes derived by this practice become useful guidelines to develop the expected concept vehicle according to costumer demand.