The Application of Kansei Engineering and Morphological Analysis in Product Form De-sign

Abstract

Currently, due to the improvement of living quality, the style of product marketing has been changed from manufacturer consideration to consumer. In general, customers’ requirements on products become more.  The manufacturers need to enhance the capability of product design and development.  As a result, they can maintain market share in rapidly short product life cycle of competitive trends.  However, it is not easy for designers or manufacturers to use objective approaches to evaluate if the product form meets customer requirements.  A consumer-oriented product design is then considered as important strategy for product design.  Therefore, the purpose of this research is to establish a suitable model and procedure for the design of product forms.  This paper used Kansei Engineering approach to the identification of the most suitable combination of product component forms.  A hand-held dryer is chosen as a design case to help explain the procedure of the proposed approach.

    During the development process, experimental questionnaires using imagery vocabularies to represent product component form are taken to respond customers’ requirements.  The concept of cluster analysis is also used to group appropriate imagery vocabularies and product component forms.  Finally, a set of important design variables are identified for building the optimum product forms.

    The results showed how the suitable combination about design variables can be identified.  It is expected that the results can assist designers to realize customers’ preferences for product forms and the relationships between customers’ requirements and product forms.