Abstract

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.