Emotional matching model construction of the interior interface form of age-friendly housing in Jinan city examined using Kansei engineering

To better meet the emotional needs of older residents and to improve the design of age-friendly indoor interface forms, this study uses Kansei engineering as the theoretical basis for an exploration of the mapping relationship between emotional needs and interface forms. First, we collected spatial interface forms through in-home research, and using focus groups, we summarized and produced test samples for interface forms; at the same time, we screened out adjective word pairs that could fully represent the emotional needs of older people in the city of Jinan, drawing on expert interviews; then, we invited 500 older adults living in Jinan all year to evaluate each interface form using representative adjective word pairs as the emotional evaluation criteria, following the semantic differential method. Subsequently, the participants were invited to evaluate and score the interface form samples using representative adjective word pairs as the standard of emotional evaluation, employing the semantic differential method. Finally, the evaluation scores were input into SPSS software for the Kruskal–Wallis test to explore the relationships between various interface forms and emotional needs. The experimental results showed that the assessment scoring results for each interface form in each set of pairs of adjectives that differed significantly, where each interface had a clear emotional tendency. This study successfully established a mapping model for matching indoor interface forms with emotional needs in age-friendly housing in Jinan. These findings can provide a reference for future practice of designing residential indoor interface forms to match the emotional needs of older people in Jinan.