Design Candidate Identification via Kansei-VR & AHP approaches

In this work the Authors show the first results of a research activity aiming at the identification of the most appealing design candidate via a new integrated Kansei Engineering process. The target was achieved by means of immersive experiments performed in Virtual Reality (VR) along with an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) performed in a visual desktop environment (PC). Both the approaches aim at the direct involvement of users into the design process, as early as possible. Focusing on the synthesis phase, once implemented the design candidates by different technical features according to a Fractional Factorial Design, the concepts are evaluated by users. The data collected by asking users to judge them are analyzed via suitable methods to guarantee the above assessment. For this purpose, two different evaluation approaches, although at different stages of the design process, are tested: the first one relies on the user experience with the product in VR whereas the second is allowable for a much cheaper visual pairwise comparison in a PC-based experimental set-up. The original result is that the two approaches can be complementary rather than alternative; here is introduced the way to harmonize them in an integrated Kansei Engineering process, in order to improve and speed-up the synthesis phase. To describe the two approaches and highlight their peculiarities, an application to the design of railway coach arrangement and furniture (briefly referred to as “train interior”) is presented