FuzEmotion-A Backward Kansei Engineering Based Tool for Assessing and Confirming Gender Inclination of Modern Cellular Phones

Abstract

Conventional cellular phone companies adopted manufacturer-orientated philosophy in product design, where the cellular phones are designed purely based on the designers’ own perceptions. However, this philosophy is no longer effective as the current market of cellular phones is shifting towards more customer-orientated domain. It has evidenced by several recent studies that customers are emotionally connected to the products during decision making. Companies need to be able to discover these feelings and reflect these feelings back to product design process. Kansei Engineering (KE) is a concept that aimed to solve this type of emotionally associated issues by integrating true customers’ felling (Kansei) into the design of products. This chapter presented a Backward KE tool named FuzEmotion, which could be used to assess and confirm gender inclination of modern mobile phones. The goal of this tool was to assist cellular phone designers to create products that can truly reflect the needs and feelings from the end users. A new FuzEmotion system was constructed based on one hundred and twenty cellular phone samples selected from five major cellular phone manufactures (Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and LG),which achieved an overall accuracy of 84.9 %. A database consisted of three hundred and thirty-one cellular phones was an essential part of the FuzEmotion system. The concept behind FuzEmotion and KE is relatively similar, which both aimed to assess end users’ feeling and try to integrate these feelings (Kansei) back to the products. Although these two systems are not directly connected to each other, this study has, in part, witnessed the feasibility of KE applications in product design.