Emotional design method of product presented in multi-dimensional variables based on Kansei Engineering

In the fiercely competitive product market, product designs have already moved from the product-oriented approach to a marketing-oriented approach, and gradually to a customer-oriented approach. Therefore, it is of high necessity to study users’ emotional needs aroused by the product's multi-dimensional design variables. This paper contributes a systematically emotional design method of products’ hard interface based on Kansei Engineering (KE), which can be used to design a product that echoes users’ emotions. Based on the representative pairwise Kansei image words and multi-dimensional key design variables obtained by the consumer-oriented techniques, the KE models are established. Finally, the integration of KE models and Genetic Algorithm is employed to search for a near-optimal design scheme. This proposed method is effectively demonstrated in terms of the mini digital camera. It can be used in various design cases to optimise the product emotional design.