KE as affective design methodology

Abstract

Throughout the years, various efforts have been done by designers and researchers in advancing product design and much knowledge was gained through cognitive functionality and usability research. Yet, the knowledge often ignores the affective quality experienced by consumers, and most importantly reaching the way to fulfil the affective needs of the consumers. In today's fierce competitive market where products are equally good in quality, affective aspects of consumers' perceive quality has become imperative in product design. In affective design field, Kansei Engineering (KE) has been gaining recognition as a technology that enables discovery of consumer's affective responses, investigation of its relationships with product design characteristic, and formulation of design guide for products that win consumers heart and mind in the highly competitive market. KE is generally applied to industrial product design. In KE, it is believed that reaching to the heart of the consumers is the key to success. The paper describes the implementation of KE in different domain, both in the industry and academic research. It will show stages of KE to develop instrument, conduct measurement, perform statistical calculation and interpret the knowledge into a shape that is useful to the audience. This paper will introduce scientific way in which appropriate design guide could be formulated geared to human experience, so that a product can be designed embedding the requirements generated by human experience. Using this design formulation, a product could be designed in such a way that it predicts what human would feel when interacting with the product, thus facilitate success strategies.