Extending Functional Design Tools to Include Sensory Attraction

By Ulrich Wörz and Joseph Zaworski.

Published by Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal

Format	Price
Article: Print	$US10.00
Article: Electronic	$US5.00

Some very powerful tools exist for functional design. For example, Quality Functional Deployment (QFD) provides a very structured process for obtaining customer requirements, using them to develop engineering requirements, identifying correlations between customer and engineering requirements, evaluating competing designs, and then defining specific, weighted design requirements. This paper looks at tools from psychology that might be used to expand the QFD process to include sensory response of customers. In particular, use of the semantic differential approach in conjunction with the Kano model for sensory attraction appears to have good potential for developing quantities that can be effectively incorporated into the product evaluation matrix of QFD. The result would be a tool that could help designers better understand the interactions between function and attractiveness.

Keywords:	Design, QFD, Customer Requirements, Sensory Attractiveness

Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal, Volume 2, Issue 3, pp.111-118. Article: Print (Spiral Bound). Article: Electronic (PDF File; 768.513KB).

Ulrich Wörz

Graduate Student, Mechanical Engineering, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, USA

Mr. Wörz has worked several years on the issues involved with making air travel accessible to passengers that must use wheelchairs. In the process he developed a detailed matrix of customer requirements using the traditional engineering approach. Further study led to a conclusion that sensory perception should be considered as an input to the traditional engineering requirements used in product design. Since that time Mr. Wörz’s work has focused on the measurement of the importance of sensory input and incorporation of that information is not the engineering design process.

Dr. Joseph Zaworski

Assistant Professor, Sr. Research, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, USA

Dr. Zaworski is a part of the design group at OSU and a researcher for the National Center for Accessible Transportation. In this position he has been responsible for teaching design classes and for the design and implementation of devices to aid persons with disabilities in travel, particularly on buses and in aircraft. In the process, he has led efforts to expand the design group to include experts in psychology and human factors and to identify ways to incorporate their expertise into the formal design methodologies currently in use.

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