A methodology of integrating affective design with defining engineering specifications for product design

Affective design and the determination of engineering specifications are commonly conducted separately in early product design stage. Generally, designers and engineers are required to determine the settings of design attributes (for affective design) and engineering requirements (for engineering design), respectively, for new products. Some design attributes and some engineering requirements could be common. However, the settings of the design attributes and engineering requirements could be different because of the separation of the two processes. In previous studies, a methodology that considers the determination of the settings of the design attributes and engineering requirements simultaneously was not found. To bridge this gap, a methodology for considering affective design and the determination of engineering specifications of a new product simultaneously is proposed. The proposed methodology mainly involves generation of customer satisfaction models, formulation of a multi-objective optimisation model and its solving using a chaos-based NSGA-II. To illustrate and validate the proposed methodology, a case study of mobile phone design was conducted. A validation test was conducted and the test results showed that the customer satisfaction values obtained based on the proposed methodology were higher than those obtained based on the combined standalone quality function deployment and standalone affective design approach.