Designing Feelings into Products-Integration of Kansei Engineering Methodology in Product Development

Tendencies in product development of today make it likely that many future products will be functional equivalent and therefore hard to distinguish between for the customer. Customers will decide by highly subjective criteria which product to purchase. One task for product development in this context is to be able to capture the customer’s considerations and feelings of products and translate these emotional aspects into concrete product design. Today a number of different methods, such as Quality Function Deployment (QFD), Semantical Environment Description (SMB), Conjoint Analysis and Kansei Engineering exist and are used in practical applications. The purpose of this thesis is to understand and apply Kansei Engineering methodology and explore ways to integrate the methodology into an industrial product development process. This was done by conducting a study on forklift trucks in different European countries and business areas and by exploring ways of integrating Kansei Engineering in product development processes. The number of Kansei words collected was reduced based on the result of a pilot study using a combination of different tools. A computerized data collection method was used in combination with a modified VAS-scale in order to reduce the time for filling out the evaluation forms The results of the study in the visited Northern and Middle European companies make it evident that Kansei Engineering has to be adapted in several aspects to the circumstances in each situation. The data showed that there are differences in attitude towards reach trucks in the different European countries. These results were used in order to adapt the product requirements for each specific country. Starting at Cooper’s stage gate model Kansei Engineering was applied on a macro level, a micro level and for verifying purpose. Using QFD, Kansei Engineering helps to identify customer needs their importance and the technical responses as well as to conduct benchmarking and to connect the customer needs mathematically to the technical responses. This study of Kansei Engineering revealed that there was no general model on the methodology available in English literature. Outgoing from a previous flowchart, a conceptual framework of Kansei Engineering was developed integrating the existing Kansei Engineering Types and future tools.