Interpreting customer needs in collaboration - a qualitative realization process for conceptual design

In Concurrent Engineering (CE), the design activity has a great impact on the product merit, costs and quality. For a new product, within CE, the conceptual design is one of the most important activities in satisfying consumers' needs. Just as collaboration mechanisms have been recognized as a viable tool for CE design. With collaboration, we can organize parallel work by different specialists, multiple opinions and potential creations for marketing opportunity. However, oftentimes the discovery of consumers' needs is executed by marketing members and it is always unclear how to transform the knowledge into the design stage. In order to improve the efficiency of mining consumers' needs by designer in collaborative design. This paper describes a semantic analysis of qualitative research procedure for transforming the consumers' opinions into conceptual design as part of an approach for developing a customer-designed model in distant collaboration. A personal communication product design example is provided.