Kansei Engineering

With a strong competition and a strong consumer awareness of quality, manufacturers have to look hard at how to satisfy needs and expectations of potential new consumers. The only acceptable level of quality is total. In addition to the functional needs, affective and emotional needs have been recognized as having primary importance for consumer satisfaction and for creating innovative products. Kansei Engineering is a newly emerged product development technique to deal with consumers' feelings and emotions and to incorporate these emotions into design elements during the product concept design phase. Kansei Engineering has enormous potentiality, nevertheless to be successful and really innovative, it needs to be integrated with the traditional methodologies for product design and to be supported by quantitative methods. The underlying aim of this research work is to minimize intuition in design decisions and to maximize the systematic use of statistical methods in product concept design phase. These methods can provide design team with the analytical tools for correctly plan experimental phases in Kansei Engineering and for analyzing the results in a reliable and efficient way.