Ideation Support for Designing Systems with Benefits of Inconvenience

Abstract

For creating new products and services, one of the traditional design policies is thinking of it enough to provide convenience to users. On the other hand, a set of popular designs has revealed that the policy is no longer valid. Alternative policies implicitly exist. Among them, this chapter focused on “providing users benefits of inconvenience (BoI).” For designing new systems under such policy, this chapter summarized four methods of thinking derived from many years of design practice. The four types of methods can correspond to four transitions of the quadrants on the 2D plane that are defined by two axes, i.e., the axis of convenience/inconvenience and the axis of benefit/harm. The four types are named according to their characteristics, i.e., Value Mining type, Problem-solving type, Emergence type, and Innovation of Meaning type. This chapter also introduced two tools that support these types of thinking. The one is BoI cards that show how to make things inconvenient and which kind of benefits will be derived from those inconveniences. The other is the necessary conditions for judging systems that provide users BoI.