Abstract
To address diversification of customer's sensitivity to perceive a product emotional quality, this paper proposes a design supporting method that quantifies the diverse customers' sensitivities. We apply the proposed method to outward design of cellular phones to show the effectiveness of the method. The result demonstrates that there are multiple viewpoints in an emotional quality expressed by an adjective word depend on personal difference of sensitivity. Using the method, we quantify each emotional scale by applying the quantification theory using design attributes of cell-phone. The analytical result shows that an emotional quality 'luxuriousness' of cellular phone includes two different semantics and evaluation scales. The analysis also demonstrates that the diversification of 'interest' is caused by a difference of a product feature to which customers pay attention. Even if a designer and a customer possess different sensitivity, or even if each customer emphasizes distinct features of a product, the proposed method enables a designer to grasp customers' emotional needs without misunderstanding using the proposed method. Furthermore, it enables a designer to obtain a new viewpoint and a new design clue by diverse emotional quantification scales obtained using the proposed method.
