Proving the proof of concept; developing new methods and knowledge to evaluate products supporting cancer therapy

This article illuminates through a case study, SuPPORT 4 All (Support, Positioning and Organ stabilisation during breast cancer radiation therapy/S4A). It describes how three-dimensional design research assesses, assimilates and is applied to define product requirements in a cross-disciplinary research team, activity occurring concurrently, yet also informing the act of designing the eventual products themselves. The study describes how a multidisciplinary research and development team, more specifically the design researchers within it, developed a range of holistic knowledge sets to establish critical criteria to validate physical outcomes. The study illustrates the methods used and developed to elicit the scale of the challenge and discusses the validity of these methods and technologies when wide-ranging design specifications may not exist at project outset.