About ENGAGE

For most companies innovation is costly and the failure rate of new product introductions is high; 40% of new product introductions fail in the marketplace (Hultink, 1997). Although functionality has always been, and will remain, an essential precondition for product satisfaction and market success, in today's culture there is evidence of the increasing importance of product experience as a driving force of product acquisition and use.

Methods for capturing the emotional needs of consumers, incorporating them into the design process and measuring consumer's emotional response are not yet properly developed, and certainly not standardised:

• Communication and collaboration between researchers as well as practitioners in this area has, historically, been limited.
  
• Existing knowledge and experience are fragmented and scattered.
  
• Local success with methods is often not well documented and validated, lacking the robustness for extrapolation to new circumstances.
  
• Emerging methods are competing with each other and industry in general does not know which ones to use in particular circumstances.
  
• Whilst some existing methods might be high quality, they often do not integrate well with established engineering life cycle processes.
  
• User feedback tends to be poorly defined and happens late in the design process.

Researchers from many disciplines (consumer sciences, psychology, ergonomics, industrial design, engineering) as well as industries (multi-sector) are responding to this need for incorporating users' emotional needs into product design from their own view points but integration is urgently needed.

The aim of ENGAGE is to provide EU industry with the means to design with full consideration for consumers' subjective and emotional lifestyle needs.

ENGAGE objectives

• Gather existing expertise & create a knowledge community
  
• Promote shared insight & establish a common language
  
• Classify methods and discuss industrial applicability & provide best practices
  
• Construct an inventory of existing tools and methods
  
• Evaluate those tools and methods
  
• Produce a classification of methods and tools
  
• Classify problems found by researchers and practitioners
  
• Set up groups of experts and special interest groups (SIGs)
  
• Identify gaps in current methods and tools & promote future research in this area