Sensory design

Among all the levers available to different companies to generate value, one of them - sensory design - is anchored in the fields of innovation and creation/design, by focusing on consumer perception. Sensory design is directly connected to the paradigm shift in human-centered engineering, which complements the techno-centric aspects of mechanical and functional product design. " ... Depending on the (design and) development phases of a project, a product or a new process, specialists representing marketing, ergonomics, value analysis, quality, the engineering department... intervene, in turn or in interaction...".

While industrial design is part of this process, and contributes to the creation of a serial object, sensory design is concerned with the mastery of everything a person perceives. By mastery, we mean effective participation in upstream design specifications (enrichment of specifications), by identifying the qualitative performances of the future design object, but not only. In fact, we specify to these qualitative performances, their levels of importance (of flexibility in the decisions to be taken during the design process), their methods of assessment and verification, right through to useful measurement techniques and the quality of conformity linked to production launch.

Sensory design plays a major role in the perceived and controlled differentiation of an object, product, space, process, material or even finish, for industrially mature companies, i.e. those that have already mastered the functional and technical issues of their products. The sensory designer embodies one of the evolutions of industrial design, and his interlocutors are the engineer, the "marketer", and even the artist.