Toward an Affective Design of Products

The measurement and understanding of user emotions elicited by product appearance are critical elements of the product development process and have been interesting design challenges for many years. This paper proposes an original emotion measurement method, called Auditory Parameter Method. It is a non-verbal technique, which uses sounds and association tests for evaluating a set of products (given by their pictures). It provides an assessment of these products according to a series of emotional dimensions. We present a methodological framework to build the links between user’s emotional responses and geometrical features of product, by using a glasses frame 3D model as application case. Analysis of Variance techniques are employed to examine how various shape factors influence users’ emotional responses to 3D model. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our protocol, we compare the proposed method with the conventional Semantic Differential using Principal Component Analysis and Generalized Procrustes Analysis. The new protocol demonstrates interesting qualities to collect the intuitive emotions of user.