Future-oriented PGE-product Generation Engineering: An Attempt to Increase the Future User Acceptance through Foresight in Product Engineering Using the Example of the iPhone User Interface

During the process of product engineering, decisions with uncertain consequences have to be made about future development (Albers et al., 2017a). Customer, user and vendor requirements that are already known and those who are relevant for the future have to be recognized and transferred into consistent projects. Classical approaches like customer surveys or market analyses are only partially useful for anticipating or validating future product requirements since they rather evaluate todays situation. Methods of foresight are preferably applied to make decisions under circumstances of uncertainty and to generate future knowledge. The following work treats thus a system that enables the user to deduce future requirements based on trend analyses. The system which was first mentioned in Albers et al. and further developed in Marthaler et al. will serve as the basis. (Albers et al., 2018a; Marthaler et al., 2019). The goal is to present and evaluate a system based on the analysis and identification of trends that allows to identify robust requirements for future product generations and to transfer them into concrete development agreements in the form of a development road map.