OCR GCSE Design and Technology

Why a designer starts with the context

A design solution is made for a particular setting and a particular group of people, so the first job is to find out what that setting asks of the product. A kettle designed for a family kitchen and one designed for a camp site are both kettles, yet the materials, size, power source and price that suit one are wrong for the other. Exploring the context means finding out where and how the product or system will be used, who will use it, and what social, cultural, moral and economic conditions surround it. What the designer learns turns into opportunities (things the product could do well) and constraints (things that limit the design), and both feed the requirements the finished product is judged against.

Where and how the product is used

The physical environment sets many requirements directly. A product used outdoors meets rain, sunlight and temperature changes, so it needs materials and finishes that resist weathering and corrosion. A product used in a hospital ward may need to be wiped clean with disinfectant, so seams and crevices that trap dirt are a fault. A product used in a noisy workshop cannot rely on a quiet beep to tell the user something has happened.

How the product is used matters as much as where. The designer asks how often it is used, for how long, by one person or several, with one hand or two, standing or sitting, and what happens when it is used wrongly. A tool used for a few seconds once a day can tolerate a different handle from one gripped for hours. Knowing the sequence of tasks a user carries out, sometimes called a task analysis, shows where the product could save effort or cause frustration.

Primary users and wider stakeholders

The primary user is the person who uses the product directly. A stakeholder is anyone with an interest in the product or affected by it, and the group is wider than the user. For a child's playground slide in a public park the primary users are children, but the stakeholders also include parents and carers who supervise them, the council that buys and maintains the equipment, the manufacturer who must make it at a profit, the installers, residents who live near the park and the people who inspect it for safety.

Each stakeholder wants something different, and the wants can conflict. A manufacturer wants low production costs, the council wants low maintenance, children want excitement and parents want safety. Identifying all of them early stops a design from satisfying one group while quietly failing another. A persona is a made-up but realistic profile of a typical user, with an age, job, habits and frustrations, which helps a designer keep a real person in mind while sketching.

Needs and wants

A need is something the product must do for the user to be able to use it at all, such as a ladder holding the weight of a person. A want is something that would improve the product but is not essential, such as the ladder folding small enough for a car boot. Separating the two helps when requirements pull against each other and something has to give.

Social, cultural, moral and economic factors

Investigating these factors shows opportunities and constraints that a purely technical view misses.

Social factors include how people live and work, such as smaller households, ageing populations, remote working, and the time people have available. A product for a growing number of people living alone might be sold in single portions or built to be compact.

Cultural factors include beliefs, customs, symbols, colours, food rules and clothing norms. A colour that signals celebration in one culture may signal mourning in another, and a product sold internationally has to avoid causing offence or confusion. Religious dress, dietary rules and the way different groups use public spaces all affect what is acceptable.

Moral factors concern what is right. A designer might ask whether a product is made by workers on fair wages, whether it is safe for children, whether it encourages harmful behaviour, or whether it uses animal products when alternatives exist. Moral questions often have no single answer, so a designer records the issue and the decision taken.

Economic factors cover what people can afford, what the product costs to make, the price the market will bear and the cost of running and repairing it. A product aimed at a low-income group must be cheap to buy and often cheap to run, and an expensive design may simply have no market however well it works.

Gathering information

Designers collect two kinds of data.

Primary data is gathered first-hand by the designer for the project in hand. Methods include:

• questionnaires and surveys, which reach many people and give numbers that can be put in charts
• interviews and focus groups, which give fewer responses but explain why people feel as they do
• observing users in the place where the product is used, which shows what people actually do rather than what they say they do
• testing existing products or simple models with users, and disassembling a product to see how it was made

Secondary data already exists and was collected by someone else. Examples are books and articles, websites, government statistics, standards and regulations, manufacturers' catalogues and technical sheets, sales figures, and reviews of existing products. Secondary data is quick and cheap to find and covers a lot of ground, but it may be out of date or collected for a different purpose, so its source needs checking.

A good investigation uses both. Secondary research shows what is already known and what has been tried, and primary research answers the questions that are particular to the people this product is for.

Questionnaire design

A questionnaire gives usable results when each question asks one thing in plain wording and does not steer the answer. A closed question ("How many times a week do you use a rucksack?" with ranges to tick) gives data that can be counted and shown in a bar chart or pie chart. An open question ("What annoys you most about your current rucksack?") gives richer answers that need reading and grouping. The sample should resemble the real users: asking only the designer's friends about a product for retired people would give misleading results.

From findings to requirements

The investigation ends in a design brief, a short statement of the problem or opportunity, the context and the users, and then in a specification, a list of requirements the solution must meet. Good requirements are specific and measurable so that the prototype can be tested against them. "Comfortable to hold" is hard to test, whereas "a handle diameter between 30 mm and 40 mm that fits the grip of an adult hand" can be measured and checked. Requirements usually cover:

• function: what the product must do
• the user: size, strength, age, and any additional needs
• the environment it is used in
• safety and relevant standards
• appearance and aesthetics
• materials, manufacture and the scale of production
• cost and the selling price
• the effect on society and the environment

Each requirement should be traceable to something found in the investigation, so that when the prototype is evaluated the designer can say which requirements were met, which were not, and what the next iteration should change.