Abstract: From industrial design, an approach of ethnography is proposed to study users’ and designers’ patterns of tacit knowledge in product design. The concepts of ethnography are introduced and the relation between ethnography and product design is explored. Taken the existed portable media center form design as an example, semantic differential, image scale and conjoint analysis etc are employed to investigate the acquiring and representing of users’ and designers’ tacit knowledge. The two-dimensional perceptual image spaces of the portable media center form are established, and the tacit knowledge patterns are presented. The results show that many differences exist between users’ and designers’ tacit knowledge representation of the same objects and their interpretations of the same image-words, and it is necessary to adopt user-centered method to study users’ tacit knowledge and find out the commonness and individualities during the product design process.

Key words: Conjoint analysis, Ethnography, Factor analysis, Product design, Semantic differential, brain networks, reservoir, time series prediction, Echo state network