“Action steps” framework published at DESIGN 2024

Our paper “Introducing a framework to translate user scenarios into engineering specifications with "action steps"”, written with Prof. KwanMyung Kim, was published in the Proceedings of the Design Society for DESIGN 2024, the 18th International Design Conference in Cavtat, Croatia (volume 4, pp. 23–34).

The framework translates in three stages: from a user scenario to action steps, which are explicit pairs of user and product actions, and from there to functional requirements and engineering specifications. Action steps make explicit the product information that scenarios usually leave implicit.

It was first tested through participant observation in the Lemmy companion-care robot project, with a team of 28 designers and engineers. The observations suggested a better shared understanding and fewer information gaps between disciplines. The framework was later developed into the Scenario-Oriented Specification (SOS) method.