Elicitation and analysis of affective needs in vehicle design

Abstract

This article describes a methodology for elicitation and analysis of affective needs for vehicle design. Driven by the concept of citarasa or emotional intent, the method has five steps. First, a model of emotional intent was conceptualised; second, a semantic framework of citarasa words was developed that mapped words to specific vehicle components to form a citarasa ontology; third, customer citarasa were elicited in the field using probe interview technique; fourth, affective needs were refined through Web survey; and fifth, the elicited citarasa were analysed using data mining techniques and the citarasa analysis tool. The tool is linked to the citarasa database that enables analysis of affective needs in several countries in Europe and Asia. The system has been technically verified, validated and tested for usability with consumers and automotive end-users.

Keywords:

• affective needs
• citarasa
• vehicle design
• human factors

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the partial grant support provided by the European Commission under Framework 6 Call 5 (CATER IST 5035030 STREP), and the contributions of 14 partners of the CATER consortium.