Customer Oriented Product Design and Intelligence

The aim of customer oriented product design is to develop products on the basis of an understanding of customers’ expectations and requirements. Customer orientation is based on both the experiences of users and customers. This is a crucial issue for the product to be accepted in the market by customers. The main steps of customer oriented product design consist of data collection, definition of customer expectations, integration of customer requirements to design characteristics, implementation of the design and production of the prototype. Under vague and imprecise environment, definition of customer expectations and integration of customer requirements to design characteristics require fuzzy and intelligent techniques to be employed. In this chapter, we summarize data collection methods for product design and fuzzy and intelligent design approaches.