Quantification Method of Diverse Kansei Quality for Emotional Design: Application of Product Sound Design

This paper proposes a quantification method of a product’s emotional quality, which we call kansei quality, with attention paid to its diversity to support the affective design. The customer’s sensitivity towards such a quality differs from person to person due to perception gaps and ambiguity. The proposed method helps the designer to grasp such diverse sensitivities of customers. In contrast to the conventional approach that aims to generalize human sensitivity using average results of sensory tests, the proposed method divides an emotional quality based on differences among the customers’ sensitivity. We apply the proposed method for designing a machine sound in which the designer deals with the sound quality as a kansei quality. We carry out an impression evaluation experiment on human subjects using existing product sounds. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the method, we compare the proposed method with the conventional approach using experimental results. The comparison results show the advantages of the method, such as the avoidance of meaningless average data caused by canceling out multiple different sensitivities. Based on the proposed method, we developed a prototype system that enables the designer to evaluate the kansei qualities of a created sound without conducting a sensory test.