Natphoric Kansei Engineering Systems (N-KES)

Abstract

Over recent years, consumers have become sophisticated and desired product that meets their desired emotional connectivity, which stands out in their eyes among the abundance choices they have from the market. Kansei Engineering (KE) has been widely attracting researchers’ attention as a technology that enables incorporation of emotion in product design. KE makes it possible to discover relationships between product design and the resulted emotional responses. Among the process in KE implementation, KE analysis is the most crucial part, and it requires a Kansei expert intervention to determine the optimum result. However, there are not many accessible Kansei experts and there is no specific rule of thumb in this process. This research proposed a web-based system comprising of Natphoric algorithm in its engine to simulate the expert intervention in a computer-aided KE implementation. The algorithm is used to imitate the expert activity to find a significant factor of emotion. It learns the process by training with datasets from previous KE research works. The Natphoric algorithm is formulated to handle the complexity in KE, and the N-KES adopted the use of one of the technique in KE Type 1 to automate the Kansei conceptualization process which requires expertise in KE. The developed N-KES has produced similar result with the manual KE implementation. This research outcome will benefit the producers and designers advocates to easily implement KE Type 1, to enable development of new and innovative product design.