Emotional Study In Form Element Of Furniture

In today's highly competitive market place, a product cannot be only designed to meet the needs of its performance. Much attention should also be paid to the consumer's mental image for the product in the design stage. Besides of color and texture's feeling, form element of furniture is the most important characteristic of product to be considered in design.Anciently, most researches focused on the history or culture of furniture. And lessinvestigation has been made into studying human's image and affective expression about form element of furniture. It is difficult to make a good design to meet the consumer's mental feeling if it is not considered by affective expression theory in furniture design.In this research, we take modern classical furniture as a case to study their emotion image. And Kansei engineering is used to switch the consumer's stable sensitivity emotion into quantification. The purpose of the study is exploring the opposition frames between form elements and cognitive image of consumer's, then help designer to design the furniture conform to the consumer's emotion in efficient methods.The experiment of the research is taken based on Kansei engineering. And furniture pictures are used as samples. Multi-dimensional scaling methods, factor analyses methods and cluster analyses methods were involved to data processing in this research. The conclusions of research shows as follow.(1) The public with considerable cultural background was elected to investigate in order to improve the reliability of the experiment. The image picture was used to unify standard to restrict the cognition of Kansei image semantics of experimented public.(2) The experiment's conclusions show that form element of furniture in image cognitive space is made up of three-dimensional space, emotional evaluation factor, utility factor and sensory evaluation factor.(3) The texture image in form element of furniture is affected on legs outline character and backrest form character, The main element that affect emotional evaluation factor is the seat of the legs form, the main element that affect utility evaluation factor is the back of morphological characteristic, sensory evaluation factors affecting the main factors is the shape morphological characteristic, three factors affecting the form of elements have a distinct difference. (4) Principles about form element of furniture in image cognitive space are established by using Quantification Type I. Finally the results of the T test show that the principles, which are used in form element of furniture designing, are possible to implement.The innovations of this study:(1) The cognition of emotions of consumer was introduced into the theory of funitrue design based on mental sence of people. This study provide theoretic base for furniture emotion and humanized design.(2) Multi-dimensional scaling methods and mathematic statistic methods was used to analyze the effect of the form of furniture on cognition of sense of consumer based on the theory of Kansei engineering. The study result had found the relationship between the element of furniture form and the emotional sensibility of consumer.(3) The forming rule of emotional furniture was built based on Kansei engineering.