**1. Introduction**

146 Industrial Design – New Frontiers

Ulrich, K.T., Eppinger, S.D., 2004, *Product Design and Development*, McGrawHill Irwin,

Walsh, V., Roy, R., Bruce, M., 1988, "*Competitive by design*", Journal of Marketing

ISBN0-07-247146-8, New York

Management, Vol. 4, No.2, pp.201-217

There are well over hundred design processes described in literature, so why invent a new one? Over the last decade we have observed a need in our department for a process that emphasises different values than most current processes highlight. To start, we have seen a desire for a process that supports design-driven innovation, that is, we step away from incremental innovation in favour of disruptive innovation, in which disruptive refers to the absence of a well-established frame of reference for users or the market. Not only the product as such is new, but it also enables the creation of radical new meaning for the user, the market and society. We have seen a desire for design processes that can deal with this openness and complexity, in order to design open and intelligent systems that evolve during use, and which have a high level of complexity due to their adaptive, context-dependent and highly dynamic character. Next to this, the role of the designer is changing. More and more we see open platforms and design projects in which a variety of people and experts create products. We believe this has implications for the design processes used. Finally, we have seen the desire for a design process that fits self-directed learning instead of teacher-directed learning, which corresponds with educational theories like social constructivist learning.

Based on these observations on the changing face of design we present the Reflective Transformative Design process (RTD process). It is a design process, particularly aimed to support the design of disruptive innovative and/or intelligent systems, products and services, that emphasises values like openness, context- and person dependency, envisioning a new society, intuition, craftsmanship and development through reflection.

In this chapter, firstly, we elaborate on the changing field of the Industrial Design and the implications this has for design processes. Subsequently, we explain the rationale behind influential paradigms of design methodology and a variety of design processes, and show why they do not match the abovementioned changes and needs. Thereupon we introduce the Reflective Transformative Design process (RTD process) in detail. We explain how it works and elaborate on the rationale behind the model. We present the design processes of two projects, Other Brother and Ennea, to elucidate and discuss the possibilities of the RTD process to design disruptive innovative systems. We conclude the chapter by demarcating the position of the RTD process in comparison to existing processes and by explaining our plans for further development of the RTD process.

Designing Disruptive Innovative Systems, Products and Services: RTD Process 149

towards disruptive innovation, or to put it in his words, we are moving towards designdriven innovation, that is based on a strong vision to create new markets. This type of innovation is not obtained by scrutinising user needs, which generally leads to incremental development, but by developing a strong vision that can guide disruptive innovation.

Fig. 1. The strategy of design-driven innovation through a radical change of meaning

*between us and the world, in the interaction*" (Matthews, 2006, p.33).

Verganti shows that in order to realise such leaps, industry must build upon so-called interpreters, i.e. "the community of players - from artists to technology suppliers to design schools - that surround every product and deeply understand and influence how people give meaning to things." (cover, Verganti 2009). So, design schools are challenged to educate students as interpreters, with visionary design skills who can advance disruptive innovation in order to enable societal transformation. They are challenged to educate designers who are able to apply new technologies in ways that are new and daring, driven by a design vision of how our world could be, and validated by solid user research. So, educate designers who are able to transform our world, preferably in beautiful ways, instead of solving problems. Designing disruptive innovations and envisioning societal transformation, is based on the concept of meaning, as is also indicated by Verganti. But what do we define as meaning? We adopt the phenomenological perspective in which meaning arises in interaction: "*How we think about the world is ... rooted in how we interact with it before we think, and so our intellectual thoughts cannot be used to explain away that pre-reflective experience. We move about the world, make use of the objects in it, respond to situations emotionally, act in order to change it, and so on. All these and other ways of interacting with the world give rise to its meaningfulness, so that the meaning of things in a sense, exist neither 'inside' our minds nor in the world itself, but in the space* 

The core of phenomenology as Merleau-Ponty (2002) describes it is *'être au monde'*, which means not only being in the world but also belonging to it, having a relationship with it, interacting with it and perceiving it in all dimensions. We perceive the world in terms of
