Applying kansei engineering and fuzzy comprehensive evaluation for the design of kitchen island

Kitchen islands designs have become one of the most requested features for consumers who are searching for a new home. Usually consumers are well aware of their basic needs, but often have little idea onkitchen islands’ appearance, types, materials, functions, and terminology showing important information. To capture the true demand of the customers, kitchen designers usually spend a lot of time on communication and modify the drawings. Today’s trendsin product development indicate that inclusion of consumer’s need to the technical aspect of product design will determine their success in the market. This paper presents an approach based on Kansei Engineering and fuzzy comprehensive evaluation to translate customer implicitneeds into applicable alternative combinations in product design stage. The kitchen island is chosen as a case to explore the feasibility of the research. A confirmation testwas performed and the results indicated that kitchen islands generated by the proposed methods have at least 74% of closeness to the customers’ subjective impression. Therefore, the study provides a useful method for designers in kitchen islandproducts that can meetcustomers’ implicit needs in reducing the time of research and development in early stage. © 2015, Chinese Society for Quality. All right reserved.