Sustainable Consumer Voices: User insights as inspirational locomotive for design strategies

Aiming to explore how user driven innovation can inform high level design strategies, an in-depth empirical study was carried out, based on data from 50 observations of private vehicle users. This paper reports the resulting 5 consumer voices: Technology Enthusiast, Environmentalist, Design Lover, Pragmatist and Status Seeker. Expedient use of the voices in creating design strategies is discussed, thus contributing directly to the practice of high level design managers. The main academic contribution of this paper is demonstrating how applied anthropology can be used to generate insights into disruptive emergence of product service systems, where quantitative user analyses rely on historical continuation.