EXPLORATION OF HINTS ABOUT A NEW AESTHETIC DESIGN BASED ON A COMBINATION OF AESTHETIC FEATURES OF EXISTING PRODUCTS

A-DEWS 2016 - Innovation of Life in Asia - Asian Design Engineering Workshop

Year: 2016
Editor: Umeda, Y.; Nomaguchi, Y.; Koga, T.; Kishita, Y.
Author: Kobayashi, Masakazu; Yamatsuta Naoto
Institution: Toyota Technological Institute, Japan
Section: Creative Design
Page(s): 028-033

Abstract

Due to maturation of science and technology, companies are required to differentiate their products in terms of subjective qualities such as aesthetics whose evaluation heavily depends on customer feeling i.e. kansei. In this research, we develop a method for exploring hints about an aesthetic design of a new product based on customers’ kansei evaluation. In the proposed method, customers evaluate existing products and explain their needs for a new product using kansei words while a designer analyzes their results using principal component analysis (PCA) and explores hints by extracting and combining aesthetic features of existing products based on the analytical results. To deal with multiple customers, customers are grouped according to their similarities by using hierarchical cluster analysis. To show the effectiveness of the proposed method, the proposed method is applied to an automotive exterior design.

Keywords: Aesthetic design, Kansei engineering, SD method, Principal component analysis, Hierarchical cluster analysis