Basic Principles and New Methods on Emotional Product Design

Emotional design is an important development trend of interaction design. Emotional design in products plays a key role in enhancing user experience and inducing user emotional resonance. In recent years, based on the user's emotional experience, the design concept of strengthening product emotional design has become a new direction for most designers to improve their design thinking. In the emotional interaction design, the machine needs to capture the user's key information in real time, recognize the user's emotional state, and use a variety of clues to finally determine the appropriate user model. Based on this background, this research uses a deep learning mechanism for more accurate and effective emotion recognition, thereby optimizing the design of the interactive system and improving the user experience. First of all, this research discusses how to use user characteristics such as speech, facial expression, video, heartbeat, etc., to make machines more accurately recognize human emotions. Through the analysis of various characteristics, the speech is selected as the experimental material. Second, a speech-based emotion recognition method is proposed. The mel-Frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) of the speech signal is used as the input of the improved long and short-term memory network (ILSTM). To ensure the integrity of the information and the accuracy of the output at the next moment, ILSTM makes peephole connections in the forget gate and input gate of LSTM, and adds the unit state as input data to the threshold layer. The emotional features obtained by ILSTM are input into the attention layer, and the self-attention mechanism is used to calculate the weight of each frame of speech signal. The speech features with higher weights are used to distinguish different emotions and complete the emotion recognition of the speech signal. Experiments on the EMO-DB and CASIA datasets verify the effectiveness of the model for emotion recognition. Finally, the feasibility of emotional interaction system design is discussed.

In today's competitive market, successful product development hinges on understanding user needs and experiences. With the proliferation of expanding technologies like the Internet of Things, developers can gather vast amounts of data about user interactions. To leverage this wealth of information effectively, a user-centred approach to product development is imperative. This paper explores the convergence of usability and emotional design in product development, examining their interplay and impact on user experience. Through a review of existing literature, it investigates influential factors shaping the prioritisation of usability and emotional design elements. Key questions addressed include identifying these influential factors, assessing their impact on usability and emotional design, and elucidating their interrelationships. By shedding light on these dynamics, this systematic review aims to inform product developers and designers, facilitating the creation of products that resonate with users on both usableand emotional levels.

In the fiercely competitive product market, product designs have already moved from the product-oriented approach to a marketing-oriented approach, and gradually to a customer-oriented approach. Therefore, it is of high necessity to study users’ emotional needs aroused by the product's multi-dimensional design variables. This paper contributes a systematically emotional design method of products’ hard interface based on Kansei Engineering (KE), which can be used to design a product that echoes users’ emotions. Based on the representative pairwise Kansei image words and multi-dimensional key design variables obtained by the consumer-oriented techniques, the KE models are established. Finally, the integration of KE models and Genetic Algorithm is employed to search for a near-optimal design scheme. This proposed method is effectively demonstrated in terms of the mini digital camera. It can be used in various design cases to optimise the product emotional design.

An improved Kansei engineering method based on the mining of online product reviews

Emotional design for smart product-service system: A case study on smart beds

Recently, smart products have not only demonstrated more functionality and technical capabilities but have also shown a trend towards emotional expression. Emotional design plays a crucial role in smart products as it not only influences users’ perception and evaluation of the product but also promotes collaborative communication between users and the product. In the future, emotional design of smart products needs to be regarded as an important comprehensive design issue, rather than simply targeting a specific element. It should consider factors such as design systems, values, business strategies, technical capabilities, design ethics, and cultural responsibilities. However, currently, there is a lack of a design model that combines these elements. Currently, there are numerous practices in emotional design for smart products from different perspectives. They provide us an opportunity to build a comprehensive design model based on a large number of design case studies. Therefore, this study employed a standardized grounded theory approach to investigate 80 smart products and conducted interviews with 12 designers to progressively code and generate a design model. Through the coding process, this research extracted 547 nodes and gradually formed 10 categories, ultimately resulting in a design model comprising 5 sequential steps. This model includes user requirements, concept definition, design ideation, design implementation, and evaluation, making it applicable to most current and future emotional design issues in smart products.

MotivationThe empowerment of design for cultural and creative products in the digital media era is further amplified by social media platforms,its emotional and subconscious impact on users is important and profound. The development of the network economy has promoted this trend. At the same time, this trend has further promoted the growth of cultural and creative products market. However, too obscure appearance design can hardly arouse the resonance of different cultural groups in a short time. As an effective method to bridge the cultural gap between consumers, emotional design has become an important driving force for the development of cultural and creative products.PurposeThe purpose of this study is to understand the impact of emotional factors on the willingness and preferences of ordinary consumers to buy Chinese cultural and creative products, and to further explore whether there are cognitive differences between the emotional design standards defined and promoted by professionals and the excellent design recognized by consumers according to their life experience and personal subjective emotional preferences.Design/methodology/approachThrough the construction of the emotional design model, this study selects four award-winning products in the cultural and creative product design competition and four commercial products with high sales volume in the online stores as research cases. Through 176 valid questionnaires conducted by non-professionals, this study makes an analysis by using the structural equation.ConclusionsThe study found that consumers' preference and purchase intention of Chinese cultural and creative products are affected by emotional design standards, but the impact results depend on the interaction of many factors. At the same time, there are also significant differences in cognitive paths between them.

In view of the high complexity of image arts processing in modern product design, this paper proposes an image non-realistic art processing method in modern product design that relies on an inline block optimization hierarchical tree algorithm. This method is adopted in modern product design. In the introduction of a nested block optimization hierarchical tree algorithm, according to the different image block level classification, the statistical autocorrelation function matrix is estimated, followed by the non-realistic art processing of each image block in the product design. Because the algorithm uses an inline block optimization hierarchical tree algorithm, this avoids the non-linear iterative phenomenon in the process of traditional product design image processing, and greatly shortens the image processing time. The simulation experiment results show that the image processing quality of the proposed algorithm is not affected due to the reduced computational complexity for the image with less complex texture details. The reduction of image processing quality affects the image processing algorithms used in modern product design.

The emotional design is a crucial issue to affect a product successful. Product designers need to pay more attention to capture consumers' perceptions and precisely measure them. However, most studies are focused on consumers' visual perception, and few studies have investigated consumers' multisensory perceptions. In this study, we have conducted an empirical application on fragrance bottle form design (i.e. vision) and fragrance/perfume (i.e. olfaction) to explore the relationship between the visual and olfactory sensory perceptions. This result shows that the fragrance bottle form design does not match to its fragrance/perfume, thus meaning that there is a significant design phenomenon for product designers having to improve.

With the development of intelligent products, products are increasingly able to provide personalised feedback to users. Product designs must meet users’ emotional needs to deliver a positive experience. The current study examined emotional design, focusing on emotional arousal and methods for converting users from negative to positive emotional states. However, products are typically used in an emotional context with a specific usage scenario. Integrating emotional elements into a design can reveal users’ concerns and needs, enabling user-centered emotional design. The current study examined the distribution of users’ attention to product features under different emotional conditions. On the basis of the theory of visual attention, this study used emotional induction methodology and eye-tracking technology to observe users’ attention to different product features after the induction of three different emotional states. We established a labeled product feature database and explored the influence of emotional scenes on user preferences. These research findings can provide theoretical support for emotional design of products under specific emotional scenarios and effectively guide designers to arrange design elements.

Flying Apsaras is the most representative image of God in Dunhuang fresco art. In order to draw the distance between flying apsaras and consumers and to promote the demand of consumers to take them home,this paper explores a new way of design based on the theory of emotional design. Based on the analysis of flying image developed on the basis of different periods,and combined with the present,in the form of Dunhuang Feitian cultural and creative design,user, diversified consumer demand and market development,analytical feelings when below and the significance of design,explore the emotional design,booster,the design of Dunhuang Feitian cultural and emotional design combined with Dunhuang Feitian cultural and design strategy. Using the emotion to influence and guide the users,to achieve the resonance of product designer and user. From the visual dimension, experience dimension, spiritual dimension derivative research and development of new era and new connotation of cultural design, make Dunhuang Apsaras "alive", make Dunhuang Apsaras culture into the public vision, meet the emotional needs of consumers, both inside and outside, and finally achieve a winwin situation of cultural heritage and cultural product innovation.

Product development becomes more and more complex. Products obtain more and more functions and at the same time they must be still attractive for the customers to ensure a successful product launch. To predict their acceptance and to gain knowledge on how to design attractive products new methods are developed in the field of the emotional design. Such a method is the Kansei Engineering, which collects the customers hidden subjective needs and their translation into concrete products. We present and validate a new form of the Kansei Engineering method for emotional assessment by the customers during the product development, based on an interactive product experience in Virtual Reality. The major novelty of our kind of method is the use of immersive representations which focuses on both, the product itself and its environmental context, too. Customers experience these virtual representations quite dynamically and with this freely describe their emotional influence on them. We come to the conclusion that more reliable emotional customer feedback can be acquired through the implementation of the proposed context paradigm shift. The fusion of product and environmental context enables the simultaneous role of the customer as a subject (actor) and an object (observer) in the virtual world, thus promoting reliable emotional reactions. Despite of some disadvantages, we propose Immersive Kansei Engineering as a reliable method for emotional product assessment by the customer.

Wheel hubs have undergone new form changes as an essential part of New Energy Vehicles (NEV). At the same time, consumers' emotional preferences for the wheel hub design of NEV differ from those of traditional vehicles. However, designers' original knowledge and experience cannot be fully applied, which has limitations. Generative algorithms have been widely used in product design. Therefore, this paper proposes a form design method that combines Kansei Engineering (KE) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) to investigate consumers' emotional preferences for wheel hub form design of NEV and provide designers and manufacturers with design insights. First, a wheel hub dataset is established by collecting and processing images from the website to train GAN and generate various design alternatives. Second, the experts deconstruct the wheel hub form into main features and screen several representative samples. Third, a Kansei questionnaire is distributed to investigate users' emotional preferences and satisfaction with the NEV wheel hub form. Next, the questionnaire data is analyzed and visualized to obtain the relationship between emotional preferences and design features to form a design guide. Finally, Design solutions are selected from the generated wheel hub alternatives according to the design guidelines to realize design automation. This study proposes a systematic method for NEV wheel hub form design, which provides theoretical and practical support for designers to meet user needs more efficiently.

The purpose of this paper is to present systemic creative product design methods based on usage-style. According to the basic meanings of usage-style, the logical hierarchical structure of usage-style was outlined and established. Combining with product design principle, this work focused on the product values system and product structure system, established the design frameworks of ‘value forming from usage-style’ and ‘structure forming from values by symbols’, presented product creative design ideas and methods, and resented some practical case studies. The results indicated that usage-style includes three levels of operational activity, such as usability, friendliness and desirability. And by analysing different levels of usage-style, designer can achieve physiological and cognitive ability of user, comfortable and conventional usage values, psychological and emotional values, cultural and aesthetic values, and can achieve some design ideals, such as functional design, barrier-free design, universal design, personal and emotional design, and cultural and aesthetic design. These design ideals can make design origin change from product or market to usage-style and make products meet the reasonable multiplex usage-styles of users' expectation.

In this study, we have summarized the theories about the customer experience and have discussed the central position of the theories and the relationship between the theories. In addition, we attempted an analysis of two cases one involving a movie and the other a car. On the basis of this discussion and case analysis, the products and services in which the concept of emotional design is applied can be positioned as customer stimuli (i.e. stimuli of consumption behavior), by which the customer experience is created through Kansei information processing. We have also verified the fact that this process is experienced by the customer.In terms of customer experience, which is difficult to manipulate and control, first, the customer’s experience can be targeted by asking the question, “What kind of experience do you want customers to have?”, and the products and services can be designed by a process in a direction opposite to that discussed in this study. This can be seen as a new product design methodology, which we define as “Customer Experiential Design” and which makes this study unique.In conclusion, we have considered and analyzed the process of design of products and services by focusing on the customer experience. The experience of customers, which is difficult to manipulate and control, has been clarified, and it is possible to implement product design in such a way as to realize the experience of the assumed customer. In addition, in this study, we have made suggestions about product design and the design process, focusing on the customer experience itself, as well as the related research and business.