Meeting Multi-User Needs in Early Design Stages: A Data-Driven Conceptual Framework for Smart and Sustainable Packaging

Effective design is becoming increasingly necessary to shorten product development times to meet evolving user demands. Thus, it is essential that designers uncover user requirements and translate them into tangible product specifications, but with the added endeavour of balancing functional and sustainability requirements. This poses several challenges to designers. In early design, designers must make important decisions based on limited knowledge, risking developing products which are rejected by users. A literature review determined that no available system is sufficient to balance multi-user requirements and design characteristics. Hence, the research goal is to address the gap in design support systems, which inspired the generation of the PRioritising and achIeving Multi-user rEquirements (PRIME) framework being proposed. The contribution of this work lies in the fusion of topic modelling, sentiment analysis, and conflict resolution techniques to enhance multi-user experience. The framework prioritises multi-user and design requirements, and translates them into product specifications. Furthermore, PRIME proposes and evaluates innovative design aspects to fulfil the established design targets. This research focuses on providing a knowledge-based framework applied in the early design stages to capture multi-user requirements and lays the foundation for concept generation. A case study of smart and sustainable packaging is considered to highlight the framework’s applicability.