ABSTRACT
In daily life, we are surrounded by and make use of environments, buildings, products, and information systems that have been designed by others. The design disciplines that contribute to our built environment and material culture each have domains of knowledge and methods that enable practitioners to understand relevant issues, make judgments, communicate ideas, and ultimately, finalize designs for the products, buildings, environments, and systems that will be made. The act of designing involves making predictions, or at least conjecturing, about how future users will respond to and interact with something that does not yet exist (Redstrom 2006). It follows that designers, and specifically product designers, should have methods for developing their knowledge of users and testing their assumptions about the interaction of users and the products being designed.
