Affective product form design using fuzzy Kansei engineering and creativity

Abstract

How to design an affective product form meeting customer’s requirements always draws much attention. In the past, a popular scheme “Kansei Engineering” was widely and successfully used in dealing with such kind of issue. However, among vast Kansei studies, none of them concerned on the most important matter in product form design: creativity. In the first place, this study proposes a new Kansei manipulation procedure in which it combines an associative creativity thinking process with the fuzzy Kansei engineering to explore a new product form matching future customers’ requirements. A horn speaker is selected as the demonstration target. In the fuzzy Kansei process, totally four final Kansei images were obtained via market survey and statistical analysis. Seven design elements were obtained via product decomposition. Then the 7-scale semantic differential scheme and fuzzification are used to quantify the qualitative properties of product image and design element respectively. A Kansei evaluation was done to 30 subjects for 19 selected samples. Based on the obtained evaluation data, the multi-linear regression and back-propagation neural network schemes are adopted to build the relationship between Kansei words and design elements. In the creative form generation process, the obtained Kansei outcomes were used as the design basis and an associative creativity thinking procedure merging with biological simulation forming. It includes six steps which is applied to develop a new product form. In the end, a verification test was performed and a satisfying result of 11.7 % has been increased in customer satisfaction.