Abstract: Today, product market is characterized by individualization. However, individualization may results in significant variances in Kansei evaluation for a product. In other words, although most of the customers may be satisfied for a product in the sense of Kansei characteristics, but some of them are not. To solve this problem, in considering the heterogeneity in customer group, robust design methodology in quality engineering is introduced to Kansei product design in this paper. Kansei distance is defined to quantitatively measure the Kansei quality. Then, by treating the Kansei parameters of the product as control factors, the highly individualized characteristics among customers as noises, and the Kansei distance as response variables, a robust design model based on single array is proposed. It shows that, by this method, customer group's mental image can be satisfied and the fluctuation of Kansei reactions among different customers can be reduced as much as possible. A Kansei design case for a mobile profile is used to illustrate and validate the proposed method.

Key words: Kansei design, response modeling, single array, Kansei distance