Scenario based user centred design process: application on innovative surgical instruments design for Minimally Invasive

This PhD research is a contribution to the design process of innovative surgical instruments, particularly for minimally invasive surgery (MIS) for which the collaboration of surgeons and engineers is inevitable. Reviewing the literature shows that there is a gap between what surgeons need and what the engineers design. An approach to fill this gap is to build a design process which enables surgeons and engineers to work together, or in other words, enables the designer to integrate the surgeon in the design process. Taking the action research as the research method, this thesis went through the action of a 2-year design project of an MIS instrument, Protige, and observed and captured the experiment. The analyses of the corpus of observation showed new aspects of design process: the coevolution of product and usage during the process, and the role of the expert user in the design progression. These results led to propose new descriptions of design process, such as emulation step and expert- UCD, and provided bases for proposing a descriptive design process model for innovative surgical instruments. The validity of the proposed model was examined by applying to another MIS instrument design, and an informatic structure was proposed as a support for the process model.

PhD Student: Rahi RASOULIFAR
Grenoble University, 2006
Director: François VILLENEUVE

Link to the manuscript