In a sense, a product is nothing but a composite of information, energy and material. Throughout design process, designers make decisions on various information about product : style, color, texture, image, dimension, the way of operation and so forth. Then, conceptual product is manufactured forming into actual physical product by adding energy and material. Finally product is launched in market and distributed to the end users. Considering product as mass of information, it is very critical for designers to have good means of accessing to and organizing information on products. However, designers conventionally depend on their experience, bunch of catalogues, or short visit to some fairs for gathering information on products. There are no systematically organized information for designing new products. If any, those are ones developed by market researchers or engineers who speak fundamentally different language from designers. It is needed to develop the infromation system through which designer can get insights on the essence of product and communicate information with multidisciplinary persons involved in new product planning. At first, the objective and scope of the present thesis is introduced forming introductory part. The discussion on design information in product planning is followed and the necessity of developemtn of new design information system is emphasized. Then, product is understood as a composite of various attributes and a set of fundamental attributes of product is defined by surveying and summarizing exisitng theories of product attributes : namely technological, human, and market attributes. The possibility of new design information system is explored by analyzing various relationships between attributes of different products : style vs. consumer, price vs. function, color vs. year of manufacture, brands vs. size and so forth. Basic structure of new information system is defined having key modules : management of attribute, input, management of data base, analysis, idea generation, and general information. Computer program 'DISPP (Design Information System for Product Planning)' with full-menu-driven interface is developed for effective retrieval and management of information. DISPP displays various visual information of product itself, percepual map, trend slope, profile chart and general information of manufacturer, style, color, price, size. Case study of camera is exemplified for demonstrating the new information system and program DISPP. Finally, findings of thesis are concluded and further prospects of the study are proposed.
