designmatricen

Designmatricen is a concept in design research that blends matrix-based assessment with metric evaluation to guide decision making across product and service development. The framework aims to make design tradeoffs more transparent by mapping ideas to multiple criteria and scoring their potential impact.

Conceptual structure: A design matrix lists design concepts or proposals as rows and evaluation criteria as columns. Criteria often include desirability, feasibility, viability, sustainability, ethics, and user impact. Scales may be qualitative or numeric, and weights can be assigned to reflect stakeholder priorities. The matrix is used to visualize tradeoffs and to support consensus in multidisciplinary teams.

Process: The typical workflow starts with defining objectives and criteria, constructing the matrix, scoring each concept, and aggregating results to identify top candidates. Iterative rounds allow revision of concepts and criteria based on feedback from users, engineers, and business stakeholders.

Applications and limitations: The approach is used in product design, service design, and urban or interface design to structure evaluation meetings and design reviews. Critics caution that reducing complex design value to scores can obscure intangible factors, bias from subjective judgments may arise, and overreliance on metrics can stifle creativity.

See also: design thinking, design matrix, metrics in design, human-centered design.