Affective-Blue Design Methodology for Product Design Based on Integral Kansei Engineering

Sustainable product designs always draw much attention. However, sustainable or green products are usually costly. This contradiction can be solved via blue design. The concept of blue design originates from the blue economy which is a popular strategy for providing sustainable, healthy, but cheap socioeconomic activities. This study innovatively implements the ideas of sustainability and economy from the blue economy, and the affection (or Kansei in Japanese) from the Kansei engineering into a product design process to become a novel affective-blue design methodology of a product form. The proposed methodology mainly contains three aspects. The first aspect is the merge of a novel Kansei blue model with the traditional Kansei engineering to deal with the semantic space and form decomposition issues encountered in the product form designing process. The second aspect is the adoption of proper data mining schemes to optimally trim and obtain the kernel information from the Kansei evaluation data of products. The third aspect is the usage of appropriate machine learning schemes to establish a precise relationship between product images and design elements from the kernel information. A case study was conducted for the form design of a computer-numerical-control lathe to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed methodology. The verification results, that all predictive errors are within 4.5% for test samples, show that our blue-affective design methodology is quite satisfying. Through applying this proposed methodology, designers may correctly evaluate and easily catch the essential blue and affective design factors for designing a good industrial product, such as a computer-numerical-control machine tool.