Trends integration process as input data for Kansei Engineering Systems

The main current evolutions in industrial design research are the following : 1 The computerization of the early design phases 2 Consumer and user centered design with in particular emotional design 3 The concurrent engineering, with collaborative work supporting tools Our goal is to modelize the preliminary phases of traditional industrial design process, in order to build new computer aided design tools in accordance with these evolutions, and above all based on the natural thought process of the designers including their own intuitive watch activities. Many research have been led in Kansei Engineering since the seventies, with many successful results. If we consider that the design process includes the three following phases : information, generation and evaluation, we can consider that most part of the studies in Kansei Engineering are more centered on applications for the generation and evaluation phases. We will focus here on the information phase, related to the input data of the Kansei Engineering process, with the presentation of a method of trends analysis, that we defined on the base of the results of a study of the cognitive activity of the designers.