Expert designers’ perceptions about designing using Kansei engineering results

Abstract

In a KE study to determine the emotional design features of a traditional product from Turkey, expert designers’ opinions were collected for the span the semantic space and span the space of properties steps of the KE methodology and an additional discussion came up. It was noted that the expert designers raised several questions about KE. They seemed to approach the potential KE results with caution because it was perceived as an intervention to their creative processes. During the interviews the following arguments came out: Design problems are irrational and wicked and do not have only one solution. What KE offers is scientific, but it may interfere with the creative process needed for designing. It can be useful for novice designers, but some experts think that they already have the intuitive knowledge of Kansei. After discussing with other KE researchers, about the similar experiences working with expert designers, there was the need to explore the issue in more detail. First, interviews were conducted with 4 expert designers. A scale was developed to assess their attitudes towards using KE results in design problems. Data was collected with an online questionnaire from 59 experts on the scale. The findings can be used in creating new strategies to introduce KE to design experts in a way that they can be convinced to use KE in their further design processes.