A Kansei mining system for affective design

Affective design has received much attention from both academia and industries. It aims at incorporating customers' affective needs into design elements that deliver customers' affective satisfaction. The main challenge for affective design originates from difficulties in mapping customers' subjective impressions, namely Kansei, to perceptual design elements. This paper intends to develop an explicit decision support to improve the Kansei mapping process by reusing knowledge from past sales records and product specifications. As one of the important applications of data mining, association rule mining lends itself to the discovery of useful patterns associated with the mapping of affective needs. A Kansei mining system is developed to utilize valuable affect information latent in customers' impressions of existing affective designs. The goodness of association rules is evaluated according to their achievements of customers' expectations. Conjoint analysis is applied to measure the expected and achieved utilities of a Kansei mapping relationship. Based on goodness evaluation, mapping rules are further refined to empower the system with useful inference patterns. The system architecture and implementation issues are discussed in detail. An application of Kansei mining to mobile phone affective design is presented. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.