Research in product design has traditionally relied on qualitative and mixed research methods, including interviews, ethnographic observation, protocol analysis, and theoretical interpretations of design thinking. These approaches have contributed substantially to understanding designers’ intentions, cognitive strategies, and decision-making processes. Nevertheless, they primarily depend on retrospective accounts or analyses of completed products, while the documentary traces generated during the design process itself have received comparatively limited methodological attention. Consequently, the complex, iterative, and often non-linear evolution of product design remains only partially accessible through conventional research methods. At the same time, design activity continuously produces a rich body of documentary evidence, including sketches, diagrams, written notes, technical drawings, digital models, prototypes, rejected alternatives, material experiments, and successive versions of design solutions. These documents provide material evidence of how design decisions emerge, develop, and are revised throughout the creative process.

Genetic criticism, originally established in literary studies, offers a systematic methodology for investigating such documentary evidence. Within this approach, documents associated with the creation of a work are treated as avant-textes and constitute the principal corpus for analysis. Rather than interpreting the finished artifact as an isolated object, genetic criticism reconstructs the genesis of a work by examining successive transformations reflected in its documentary traces. Over recent decades, the method has expanded beyond literary manuscripts to fields such as visual arts, architecture, cinema, and other creative disciplines, demonstrating its flexibility in analyzing creative processes through material evidence. However, despite the documentary richness of product design, a comprehensive methodological framework for adapting genetic criticism to the distinctive characteristics of design processes and their diverse documents remains underdeveloped.

This study therefore investigates the applicability of genetic criticism as a methodological framework for product design research. The principal research question examines how product development can be systematically analyzed by integrating established design research methods with genetic criticism. Rather than replacing conventional qualitative methods, the proposed framework complements them by introducing documentary evidence as a primary analytical source and providing a structured approach for reconstructing the evolution of design ideas.

To achieve this objective, influential elements of the design process are organized into three analytical categories adapted from selected concepts within Genette’s transtextuality: paratext, metatext, and hypotext. Paratexts include contextual, organizational, technical, and environmental factors surrounding design activity. Metatexts encompass reflective, explanatory, evaluative, and communicative materials produced throughout the design process. Hypotexts consist of underlying conceptual, technological, historical, cultural, and formal references that inform design thinking. These categories are analyzed in relation to the evolving corpus of avant-textes to identify the mechanisms through which design ideas are progressively transformed into a completed product. Particular attention is devoted to successive modifications, revisions, combinations, substitutions, adaptations, and other developmental changes that characterize the creative process.

Based on this analytical framework, the study develops an operational model of genetic criticism specifically adapted to product design. To demonstrate its applicability, the model is illustratively applied to a product design case, not as comprehensive empirical validation but as an example of its analytical capacity. The application draws on an extensive documentary archive generated during an industrial product’s development. The materials include preliminary sketches, design notes, technical drawings, digital models, prototypes, revision records, and supporting documents. Together, these materials form a coherent corpus of avant-textes through which the framework reconstructs successive design stages and identifies relationships between documentary evidence and creative decision-making. The application demonstrates how documentary evidence can be systematically organized and interpreted to reconstruct a design project’s developmental trajectory and the relationships among contextual influences, design decisions, and successive transformations.

The findings indicate that integrating documentary analysis with conventional design research methods provides a more comprehensive understanding of product genesis than approaches focusing exclusively on designers’ verbal accounts or final products. The proposed framework enables researchers to reconstruct design development systematically while preserving the temporal sequence and material evidence of creative decisions. It also provides a structured methodology for organizing heterogeneous documents generated throughout product development and examining their interrelationships within a coherent analytical model. The model is intended for research situations in which sufficient documentary evidence of design development is available; it is not proposed as a universal replacement for other qualitative approaches.

Beyond its methodological contribution to product design research, the study also extends the theoretical scope of genetic criticism. The diversity, multimodality, and technical specificity of product design documents broaden the traditional concept of the avant-texte and demonstrate the adaptability of genetic criticism beyond its literary origins. The model is limited by the availability, completeness, and reliability of design documentation. Further studies involving additional cases and empirical validation are therefore required to assess and refine its explanatory capacity. By establishing an operational framework for analyzing design documentation, this research opens new perspectives for investigating creativity as a document-based and traceable process and contributes to future studies in design methodology, creativity research, and interdisciplinary applications of genetic criticism.