Biologically inspired product design combining Kansei Engineering and Association Creative Thinking Method

Morphological analysis is mostly used to describe the local modeling of products in traditional Kansei Engineering (KE). Because of being limited by the known and inherent features, KE can only generate a limited number of new modeling without providing a rich source of creativity. To get rid of the shackles of inherent characteristics, KE and Association Creative Thinking Method (ACTM) are combined in this paper to stimulate the bionic design creativity. The creativity of bionic design comes from the association of highly ordered Kansei vocabulary, and the product form derived from this can significantly enhance emotional value and user satisfaction. The electronic scale is taken as an example and the research is divided into three stages. Firstly, samples and Kansei words are widely selected; the priority order of each Kansei word is obtained after continuous fuzzy Kano model analysis. Secondly, after morphological analysis deconstructs product features, support vector regression establishes an engineering model between the highest-ranking Kansei words and products' form features so as to generate the optimal product design. Finally, after six operational steps of ACTM, a series of biologically inspired creative designs are obtained. The research results found that: 1. Customers ranked their Kansei needs for electronic scales in order of cute, fashionable, and elegant. 2. The circular appearance, square screen, U-shaped mechanical key and other styling components can easily trigger customers' cute emotional needs. 3. The biomimetic design of fish tail, cat paw, and octopus style meets the Kansei needs of customers and provides parameter guidance for manufacturers. Compared to traditional KE, which only obtains the optimal design combination for morphological analysis table, combining ACTM's biomimetic inspired design makes creative shapes more vivid and interesting, improving market sales and the success rate of new product development.