Abstract: To increase the chance of launching a successful product into market, it is essential to satisfy customers’ affective needs during the product design stage. However, understanding customers’ affective needs is very difficult task and product designers might misunderstand the customers’ affective needs. In this study, linguistic summarization with fuzzy set is used to present customers’ affective needs with natural language statements which could be easily understood by human beings. The relations between customers’ affective needs and product design elements are represented by type-I and type-II fuzzy quantified sentences. To illustrate the applicability of the linguistic summarization with fuzzy set in translating customers’ affective needs to natural language statements, a case study is conducted on mobile phone design. The results indicate that the linguistic summarization with fuzzy set can be a useful tool to assist designers to create products satisfying affective needs of customer
