Development of Industrial Design Support System Using Impression Words Considering Difference among Individuals among Individuals

Abstract

A method for supporting industrial design with special attention paid to the diversity of Kansei was proposed to respond to the quickly diversifying customers' requirements. As Kansei is very individualistic in nature, a new approach is needed to accommodate the difference from person to person to really reflect the customer's preference in terms of Kansei or his or her personal evaluation Kansei feature. Therefore, such a method was developed which creates a different Kansei space for each different user, by applying a semantic differential method and a principal component analysis to the impression words. A prototype system was developed with cellular phones as samples and the usefulness of our method was demonstrated.