A Taguchi-based Kansei engineering study of mobile phones at product design stage

Abstract

This article is aimed at applying Taguchi method in Kansei engineering and explores a way to integrate it into an industrial product design stage. Emotional customer needs are derived using Kansei image word pairs. The Taguchi-based approach is validated by a case study with mobile phones. Experimental work in implementing the proposed approach was able to suggest design attributes of a mobile phone that are essential to be considered at the product design stage to satisfy the customers’ expectations and hence to increase the company's sales.

Keywords:

• Kansei engineering
• mobile phones
• Taguchi method
• product design

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Production Planning and Control (PPC) editor-in-chief Dr Stephen Childe for processing their submission in a timely manner and also three anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments which helped them to improve an earlier version of this article. The authors are also grateful to the 6th International Symposium on Intelligent and Manufacturing Systems (IMS 2008) organising committee (Drs Cemalettin Kubat, Ercan Oztemel, Harun Taskin and Burhan Turksen) for advising an earlier version of this article for publication consideration in PPC.