Evaluation of Desirability Assessment Techniques for Tunable Solid State Lighting Applications

Abstract

Tunable Solid State Lighting (SSL) systems based on Light-Emitting Diode (LED) technology allow us to supply customizable lighting for both colored and white light applications. This means that lighting can now be tailored to meet user preferences and expectations for practically any environment or application. The ability to measure difficult-to-quantify emotional impressions is necessary to better understand how people will likely respond to lighting applications and may be useful in providing practical, easily discussable results to designers, and development teams creating such systems. Borrowing from techniques developed by user experience researchers in the software industry, this study provides an examination of different methodologies used to assess highly subjective responses for residential lighting applications. Overall, the two new word selection methods yielded results that were consistent with the classical methods. The word selection exercises provided a rich data set useful for deeper insight understanding general differences in the overall impression.