Interaction-Based Design Understanding for Emotional Design Review

Due to the diversifying customer needs, emotional qualities are becoming critical factors in product development as well as the functional requirements which are still on the first priority. In addition to that, customers are becoming more involved in product development because of the trend which requires customer-centered design. To support the customer design, various tools are proposed including the design review by the customer using emerging technologies such as virtual reality. However, those tools require special devices and environments, which are not always available for general customers. This paper focuses on the design understanding aspects for emotional design review, which could be performed by general users of products as well as designers. The idea is to understand the physical shape of a product by way of interaction with its virtual model, which are normally hard to recognize just by looking at conventional display images. First, this paper describes research backgrounds to clarify the issues of reviewing emotional design. Then this paper proposes an idea of interaction-based design understanding, which could be used to support emotional design reviews conducted by general users of products. Providing some examples using a prototype system based on the idea, this paper describes how to implement the idea. This paper also presents some other application of this idea using a dental application. Finally, the paper discusses the feasibility of the idea and gives some concluding remarks with future direction of this study.