Consumer-Oriented Emotional Design Using a Correlation Handling Strategy

Emotional product design is of great importance in new product development (NPD). Especially, Kansei engineering has been widely advocated because of its effectiveness and reliability in handling consumers' emotional requirements. However, the following key issues in Kansei engineering have not been well addressed: 1) how to capture human emotions, 2) how to identify the relationships between products and emotional needs, and 3) how a product can be improved to better fit consumers' emotional needs. This research aims at realizing a product design system for emotional effect (PDSEE) to facilitate emotional design processes. Generally, the proposed PDSEE comprises three modules, i.e. an emotional needs management module (ENMM) to capture and manipulate customer emotions, a product classification module (PCM) to examine the relationship between the product and emotions, and a product reconfiguration module (PRM) to manage and analyze product attributes so as to achieve product configurations with desired emotional impacts. To illustrate the capability of the prototype PDSEE, a case study of wedding ring design is presented. The results show that the prototype system is able to handle a large number of Kansei adjectives, address relationships between Kansei and products, and effectively identify key product parameters for designing new products with better emotional impacts.