Affective design decision-making—issues and opportunities

Abstract

Understanding the affective appeal of consumer products is important for today's consumer-oriented markets. However, very few tools and techniques are available that support affective decision making within a product development process in a way to enhance rather than replace current operations. This paper reports on a project to develop an Affective Toolkit for incorporating decision-making within product development processes. The tools have their roots in Kansei Engineering and we have refined this methodology for use with branded consumer goods. We have worked on case studies with several companies which offered a unique perspective on how affective product appeal can be incorporated within design decision making. This paper reports on two of these studies and discusses issues experienced when trying to implement such affective decision making in an industrial context. The analysis of this insight is reported as a research agenda for affective engineering and highlights a number of opportunities for future work.

Keywords:

• Design decision-making
• Affective engineering
• Kansei engineering

Acknowledgements

The work reported in this paper was carried out as part of Knowledge Transfer Partnership No. 6179, to ‘Apply Kansei Engineering to the European Packaging Industry’ in conjunction with Faraday Packaging Partnership and PIRA International Ltd. The authors of this paper would also like to thank all the participating company members of the Faraday Packaging Partnership who had significant input into the definition of this process. Special thanks must go to the client companies who provided the case studies reported here.