Customer Engagement in Product Development: Bring UX Upstream

Early version CE focused on efficiency of product development. Then with the diversification of customer requirements, it changed to collaborative engineering and the emphasis was placed on how experts from different fields can work together as a team to come up with a solution to respond to the diversifying requirements. But these versions are primarily producer-centric and customers are considered to be end-users or passive consumers. But if we note CE is the tool to integrate all processes, we will be aware that we forgot about the last process of usage. If we can get customers involved in design and manufacturing, we can create experience for our users beyond UX and customers can enjoy being a player in the game. Their needs for self-actualization will be satisfied and they will be most happy. To achieve this, reconfigurable modularization is expected to provide a versatile tool for design And manufacturing and it will not only turn design and manufacturing to value creating processes, but it also may enable us to grow our product value for the lifetime. This can be realized because this new approach pays attention to the fact not only products, but processes also generate values.