Understanding the Context of Product Development

Adaptation of design methodologies to the context in which they should be actually applied is seen as a necessity in order to enhance its acceptance and to widen its application. Even though, a context dependent adaptation is seen as a suitable means to make a substantial improvement of current design methodologies, only few contributions were made over the last years, and it often remains somewhat fuzzy what context actually means.
This paper is intended to consolidate the different meanings of context, ways to represent and specify the context and ways to structure the different views on the context.
A scheme for categorising influencing factors is presented. The scheme consolidates factors from literature which have been identified as having an influence on design projects. It is seen as a means to support understanding of a design approach and its context. Therefore, the scheme is a consolidation of existing work, which allows a more comprehensive description and analysis of the context than the more specific lists and schemes from literature.