Decision support for the design of affective products

Affective design quantifies user reactions and defines their relationship to physical parameters of designs. This knowledge can inform the generation of better interfaces between product and user and can increase the product appeal in both mature and new markets. This study presents a decision support framework that assists the development of emotionally appealing products by eliciting user needs early in the development process. It has been developed and validated through industrial case studies. Some aspects of the approach have evolved from Kansei engineering but the fields of linguistics, engineering and psychology have contributed further functionality and user support. The framework can be adopted at any stage early in the product development process to provide guidelines for optimising the emotional product communication. The framework embodies methods for adjective selection, concept definition, user experiments and quantitative user evaluations. Using these, the practitioner can select the range of user-focused evaluations central to the product concepts. The measurement of the consumer perceptions uses a controlled semantic differential survey. The results are analysed using a range of statistical techniques including principal component analysis.