Development of novel design methodology for product mass customization based on human attributes and cognitive behaviours

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The competition in the global market is accelerating rapidly because of less technological gap, matured manufacturing level, and various changing customer needs. Increasingly customers choose products in terms of experience desires, psychological desires and whether the products can reflect their values, in addition to the main product functions. Moreover, there are a large number of small and medium sized manufacturing companies in the developing countries. OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) and simple mass production cannot generate good value for these manufacture companies, and they have been seeking new opportunities to create higher value for their products/services and satisfy different needs of customers. Mass customization is one of the main business forms in the future, which can best meet the needs of individual customer, especially psychological needs. The key to mass customization is to provide enough modules to meet individual needs with a limited cost increase. The problem has been how to identify the real user needs and individual differences. The purpose of this research is to develop a sound design methodology based upon the current product design theories and practices for future product innovation and sustainable growth of small and medium sized manufacturing enterprises. The research focuses on the user-product cognitive behaviours and the relationship between human attributes and product features. Orthogonal experiment, eye tracking technology and artificial neural network have been successfully applied in this research. The research has developed a user needs hierarchy model and added value hierarchy model, and a robust theoretical basis to predict and evaluate (individual) user needs for product design. The research has further made the following contributions: 1) The relationship between human attributes and product features has been established, which can help designers understand the differences of various customer groups; 2) The different effects of various influence factors on people’s cognition and preference choice based on vision have been analysed and discussed; 3) A new method to identify, cluster, and combine common needs and personalized needs in early design stage for mass customization has been developed; 4) The research results can be reused in the future design of the same or similar kind of products

'The emotional wardrobe': a fashion perspective on the integration of technology and clothing

Since the Industrial Revolution, fashion and technology have been linked through the textile and manufacturing industries, a relationship that has propelled technical innovation and aesthetic and social change. Today a new alliance is emerging through the integration of electronic technology and smart materials on the body. However, it is not fashion designers who are exploiting this emerging area but interaction design, performance art and electronic and computing technologists. 'The Emotional Wardrobe' is a practice-based research project that seeks to address this imbalance by integrating technology with clothing from a fashion perspective. It aims to enhance fashion's expressive and responsive potential by investigating clothing that can both represent and stimulate an emotional response through the interface of technology. Precedents can be found in the work of other practitioners who merge clothing design with responsive material technology to explore social interaction, social commentary and body responsive technology. Influence is also sought from designers who investigate the notion of paradoxical emotions. A survey of emotion science, emotional design, and affective computing is mapped onto a fashion design structure to assess if this fusion can create new 'poetic' paradigms for the interaction of fashion and technology. These models are explored through the production of 'worn' and 'unworn' case studies which are visualised through responsive garment prototypes and multimedia representations. The marriage of fashion and technology is tested through a series of material experiments that aim to create a new aesthetic vocabulary that is responsive and emotional. They integrate traditional fashion fabrics with material technology to enhance the definition of fashion. The study shows that the merger of fashion and technology can offer a more personal and provocative definition of self, one which actively involves the wearer in a mutable aesthetic identity, replacing the fixed physicality of fashion with a constant flux of self-expression and playful psychological experience. The contribution of the research consists of: the integration of technology to alter communication in fashion, a recontextualisation of fashion within a wider arena of emotion and technology, the use of technologies from other disciplines to materialize ideas and broaden the application of those technologies, and the articulation of a fashion design methodology

Drivers of Consumers’ Emotional Engagement with Everyday Products: An Intensive Review of the Literature and an Attempt to Conceptualize the Consumer-Product Interactions Within the Emotional Design Process

This research intensively reviews the literature on designing emotional-driven products and aims to identify the drivers of the consumers’ emotional engagement with everyday products. The research also aims to develop a conceptual framework based on the basic model of product emotions and the classical process control, by which the identified emotional drivers in consumer products, the basic concerns of consumers, the context of the consumer-product interactions, and the design approach(s) would be interrelated and modeled. Furthermore, this research will study the psychological and theoretical perspectives on the human phenomenon of emotion to understand what does an emotion means, and why and how a human experiences emotion when interacts with stimulus (e.g. product), and how important and rewarding to design for emotions. The research has identified four basic concerns of every consumers; personal, cultural, social, and organizational (societal), and it suggests four emotional drivers; seeing-drivers, feeling-drivers, using-drivers, and touching-drivers. Moreover, as a result of the consumer-product interactions, two more emotional drivers are developing overtime to represent conclusive factors in consumer’s decision making process; product and brand experiences. These two emotional drivers also play the role as becoming new consumer’s concerns (emotional references) each time the consumer decide to buy a product

Development of novel design methodology for product mass customization based on human attributes and cognitive behaviours

The competition in the global market is accelerating rapidly because of less technological gap, matured manufacturing level, and various changing customer needs. Increasingly customers choose products in terms of experience desires, psychological desires and whether the products can reflect their values, in addition to the main product functions. Moreover, there are a large number of small and medium sized manufacturing companies in the developing countries. OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) and simple mass production cannot generate good value for these manufacture companies, and they have been seeking new opportunities to create higher value for their products/services and satisfy different needs of customers. Mass customization is one of the main business forms in the future, which can best meet the needs of individual customer, especially psychological needs. The key to mass customization is to provide enough modules to meet individual needs with a limited cost increase. The problem has been how to identify the real user needs and individual differences. The purpose of this research is to develop a sound design methodology based upon the current product design theories and practices for future product innovation and sustainable growth of small and medium sized manufacturing enterprises. The research focuses on the user-product cognitive behaviours and the relationship between human attributes and product features. Orthogonal experiment, eye tracking technology and artificial neural network have been successfully applied in this research. The research has developed a user needs hierarchy model and added value hierarchy model, and a robust theoretical basis to predict and evaluate (individual) user needs for product design. The research has further made the following contributions: 1) The relationship between human attributes and product features has been established, which can help designers understand the differences of various customer groups; 2) The different effects of various influence factors on people’s cognition and preference choice based on vision have been analysed and discussed; 3) A new method to identify, cluster, and combine common needs and personalized needs in early design stage for mass customization has been developed; 4) The research results can be reused in the future design of the same or similar kind of products.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

IMPORTANT FACTORS IN THE DESIGN OF ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGY TO AVOID THE STIGMATIZATION OF USERS

abstract: Some disabled users of assistive technologies (AT) have expressed concerns that their use of those AT devices brings particular attention to their disability and, in doing so, stigmatizes them in the eyes of their peers. This research studies how a wide range of design factors, influence how positively or negatively users of wearable technologies are perceived, by others. These factors are studied by asking survey respondents to estimate the degree to which they perceive disabilities in users of various products. The survey was given to 34 undergraduate Product Design students, and employed 40 pictures, each of which showed one person using a product. Some of these products were assistive technology devices, and some were not. Respondents used a five-bubble Likert scale to indicate the level of disability that they perceived in this person. Data analysis was done using SPSS software. The results showed that the gender of the respondent was not a significant factor in the respondent's estimation of the level of disability. However, the cultural background of the respondent was found to be significant in the respondent's estimates of disability for seven of the 40 pictures. The results also indicated that the size of AT, its familiarity to the mainstream population, its wearable location on the user's body, the perceived power of the user, the degree to which the AT device seemed to empower the user, the degree to which the AT device was seen as a vehicle for assertion of the user's individuality, and the successfulness of attempts to disguise the AT as some mainstream product reduced the perceived disability of the user. In contrast, symbols or stereotypes of disability, obstructing visibility of the face, an awkward complex design, a mismatch between the product's design and its context of use, and covering of the head were factors that focused attention on, and increased the perception of, the user's disability. These factors are summarized in a set of guidelines to help AT designers develop products that minimize the perceived disability and the resulting stigmatization of the user.Dissertation/ThesisM.S.D. Design 201

30th International Conference on Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases

Information modelling is becoming more and more important topic for researchers, designers, and users of information systems. The amount and complexity of information itself, the number of abstraction levels of information, and the size of databases and knowledge bases are continuously growing. Conceptual modelling is one of the sub-areas of information modelling. The aim of this conference is to bring together experts from different areas of computer science and other disciplines, who have a common interest in understanding and solving problems on information modelling and knowledge bases, as well as applying the results of research to practice. We also aim to recognize and study new areas on modelling and knowledge bases to which more attention should be paid. Therefore philosophy and logic, cognitive science, knowledge management, linguistics and management science are relevant areas, too. In the conference, there will be three categories of presentations, i.e. full papers, short papers and position papers