Application of Kansei Engineering in High-Speed Train Interior Design

Abstract

Currently the design of the interior environment for high-speed trains is mainly concerned with the basic functional needs and the design style is decided by the designer's subjective will which doesn't represent the passenger's wish. High-speed trains are a highly efficient and comfortable transportation tool, and the passengers are becoming more demanding of the visual beauty of the train's interior environment style and the essence of brand culture, but the passenger's feelings and preferences are hard to define and quantize. Therefore, the concept of Kansei engineering is introduced to study its application in the design of interior environment for high-speed trains. From the perspective of ergonomics and psychology, with the passenger's emotional need as starting point, the authors transform the obscure emotional need into design elements, which are used to guide the design of train's interior environment. In this paper the authors took the high-speed train seat design as an example and described the details of seat design elements. The authors then used semantic differential method to make subjective evaluation and multivariate analysis method to analyze and summarize the relationship between style and emotional characteristics, which can be used to produce a design that meets the passengers' emotional needs.