Conference Agenda

How can rich user scenarios become engineering specifications without losing the user experience they are meant to preserve?

In interdisciplinary product development, user scenarios are often used to communicate context, goals, and lived experience. However, when these narratives are transferred to engineering teams, their experiential intent can become diluted, requirements may become ambiguous, and specifications may lose traceability to the original user need. This workshop addresses this challenge as the experience–specification gap.

In this 90-minute hands-on Explorations session, participants will work in teams to translate an elder-care robot scenario into engineering specifications using the Action Steps method. Rather than treating scenarios as informal design stories, the session uses them as structured evidence for specification development.

Participants will work with Novy, a smart elder-care robot designed to support nocturnal awakening, medication access, safe movement, and nighttime assistance. Through a guided six-step sprint, teams will identify scenario elements, form user–product interaction sequences, derive functional requirements, select components, define target specifications, and evaluate component placement.

The session will conclude with peer review and group reflection on traceability, interdisciplinary negotiation, and artifact quality. Participants will leave with a practical framework, a practitioner manual, a workbook, working examples, and reusable templates for teaching, research, or practice.

This workshop welcomes participants from any background who are interested in human-centered design, engineering design, product design and development, scenario-based design, robotics, healthcare design, interdisciplinary collaboration, or design research methods. No prior experience with the method is required.