A robust design approach for enhancing the feeling quality of a product: a car profile case study

Abstract A consumer's feeling plays a key role in determining his or her affection for a product. However, estimating, reviewing, and enhancing this feeling are difficult since (1) no suitable criteria are available to do so, (2) a variance exists between different consumer's evaluations, and (3) no practicable design process is available. This paper develops the concept of “feeling quality” to concretize the feeling effects evoked by a product. A robust design method is applied to enhance this quality by reducing the discrepancy between the actual consumer feeling and the target feeling, and by reducing the feeling ambiguity induced by the highly individualized characteristics of the consumers. The proposed robust design is verified in a case study concerning a passenger car profile. A target feeling is specified and three original car shapes are redesigned on the basis of the optimal parameters identified by the robust design in order to minimize the feeling discrepancy and the feeling evaluation variation. The results confirm that compared to the original profiles, the redesigned profiles evoke an enhanced “feeling quality”. Specifically, the feeling discrepancy and the feeling ambiguity are reduced by 41.31% and 51.49%, respectively. Relevance to industry This paper presents a robust design approach, which assists designers in enhancing the feeling quality of their products. The approach enables the optimal design parameters to be identified and overcomes the problem of consumer differences through the use of a simple experimental and analysis procedure. Adopting the proposed method substantially reduces the likelihood of generating faulty designs.