Surface design methodology : challenge the steel

The way a product or material is experienced by its user could be different depending on the scenario. It is also well known that different materials and surfaces are used for different purposes. When optimizing materials and surface roughness for a certain something with the intention to improve a product, it is important to obtain not only the physical requirements, but also the user experience and expectations. Laws and requirements of the materials and the surface function, but also the conservative way of thinking about materials and colours characterize the design of medical equipment. The purpose of this paper is to link the technical- and customer requirements of current materials and surface textures in medical environments. By focusing on parts of the theory of Kansei Engineering, improvements of the companys' products are possible. The idea is to find correlations between desired experience or «feeling» for a product, -customer requirements, functional requirements, and product geometrical properties -design parameters, to be implemented on new improved products. To be able to find new materials with the same (or better) technical requirements but a higher level of user stimulation, the current material (stainless steel) and its surface (brushed textures) was used as a reference. The usage of focus groups of experts at the manufacturer lead to a selection of twelve possible new materials for investigation in the project. In collaboration with the topical company for this project, three new materials that fulfil the requirements -easy to clean and anti-bacterial came to be in focus for further investigation in regard to a new design of a washer-disinfector for medical equipment using the Kansei based Clean ability approach CAA. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd