A Study on the Effectiveness of Kansei Engineering in Cultural Design

Today, people from different cultural and emotional background around the world use products that are the results of the globalization process and the integration of technology into the various aspects of their life. Lack of cultural considerations in design process is a matter of concern for many nations, including Iranians, due to a large gap between technological development and cultural identity. Therefore, it is necessary to take cultural factors into design considerations so as to retrieve the cultural identity in products and to create an emotional interaction between user and product. The present study thus aimed to find an effective method for integrating culture into the design process in order to provide new values in products and fill the mentioned gap. In this regard, Kansei engineering was proposed as a rule-based method to evaluate its effectiveness in identifying cultural needs and transforming them into design parameters. For this purpose, 5 rose water sprinklers were selected as Iranian cultural artefacts and used for identifying the design parameters of the rose water bottle using Kansei engineering. 60 industrial design students examined 5 photos of the sprinklers in an online questionnaire survey with 26 Kansei words using the SD method. Exploratory factor analysis and cluster analysis were adopted for analyzing the data collected through the questionnaires. And finally, the design parameters were extracted. The results indicated the effectiveness of Kansei engineering in integrating culture into the design process by guiding the designer to identify the cultural considerations in a distinct and organized manner.

Keywords:

Culture , Interaction , Emotions , Kansei Engineering