Case study: Redesigning a Kansei Engineering Designed Scissors by User Centered Design Approach

This paper is based on the research which was conducted earlier on Kansei Engineering (KE) and resulted in a new concept for scissors to redesign it with another method called “User Centered Design” (UCD). This is a shift from translation of the consumers’ psychological feeling about a product related to their perception of the design (KE) to focus on designing for and involving users in the design process (UCD). According to UCD process, after understanding and specifying the context of use, specifying the requirements and evaluation of KE concept were simultaneously (by 52 users, 30 female and 22 male), next steps were producing design solutions and evaluating those solutions about requirements (by 41 subjects, 26 female and 15 male). Specifying the requirements and evaluations were by usability test via focus groups and interviews. The final concept obtained high available satisfaction rates defined in the research project. In addition, some comfort design factors for hand tools (e.g. reducing wrist bent while working and reduction of hand pain) were measured and the new designed product achieved a highly satisfactory result. At last a comparison between UCD and KE had been done.This paper is based on the research which was conducted earlier on Kansei Engineering and resulted in a new concept for scissors to redesign it with another method called “User Centered Design” (UCD). Kansei Engineering (KE) as a kind of human ergonomic technology refers to the translation of the consumers’ psychological feeling about a product related to their perception of the design. UCD is a general term for a method which focuses on designing for and involving users in the design process. It can effectively be substituted with those methods only covering the surface requirements of users. UCD includes iterative design and evaluation through gathering the user requirements and understanding the context of use. The collected and produced data yielded some new ideas as well while being eventually evaluated by end-users. The final concept obtained high available satisfaction rates defined in the research project. In addition, some comfort design factors for hand tools (e.g. reducing wrist bent while working and reduction of hand pain) were measured and the new designed product achieved a highly satisfactory result.