Beyond the Functional Dimension of the Innovative Product Design: What other Features do Consumers Value?

Companies develop products and services that fill the consumers’ more and more demanding needs and wishes, putting functionality, technological innovation, superior quality and special design in one product, and the consumers can give valuable information as regards the prospective needs and the ways they can be met. Design, as it is perceived nowadays, is a relatively new specialty, which came out of the problems raised by the industrial production in the market economy, taking into account the signals coming from the consumers, against a fierce fully competitive background, necessarily innovative and thus risky. Thinking about the role of the industrial in the past century as well as in the future and about the impact of contemporary technological progress on the innovative product design, the present paper aims to underline the actual status of design going beyond the functional value. Reconsidering the “design type” shapes requests in conceiving innovative products and a more and more deeply consumers’ involvement in the design process are given by the present socioeconomic conditions.