Automatic digital mood boards to connect users and designers with kansei engineering

Abstract One challenge for designers is how to express emotions to clients when helping them analyze ideas for the development of products. Mood boards, which comprise a set of images and words, are one of the most common tools for synthesizing a client's perception and instructing the designer about visual communication. The creation of these boards is time-consuming and becomes static before the end of the design process. This article investigates the possibility of building a kansei engineering system that is based on rough set probability statistics and is capable of linking kansei words obtained from clients with images that can be continuously collected online. The result is a proposal for a new kansei engineering procedure that contains five cycles and captures users' opinions in all phases of the design process. A subset of real data is used in the application of this procedure to a consumer product, which demonstrates the feasibility of this kind of application. The article presents a complete theoretical model of this system and its procedures and algorithms, which enables the creation of automatic mood boards and connects designers to users' needs.