Ming-Luen Chang

In the field of industry design, the affective response characteristic can plays a significant role that could grasp customer’s attention in product. Especially, the design strategy of ‘‘affection-prerequisite’’ shows the importance of the trend of customer-oriented for the industry products. Up to date, in consideration of the rapidly life-cycle on industrial design field, however, how designers can retrieve customer’s affective response promptly and using such information into their design work efficiently are significant, but not discussed yet. Based on this concept, the objective of this research is to present a creative stimulation system for designers. The ‘‘wisdom of crowds’’ was collected via the Web in order to ascertain customers’ affective responses to product shapes. This data was used to create an evolutionary design system platform by using a design alternatives generation mechanism. The study involved integrating an interactive genetic algorithm into the mechanism to generate an interactive creative stimulation system. An affective design of the shape of a mobile phone was used as an example of implementation and also used as a proof of the research concept. Relevance to industry: HIGA and ESC methods proposed in this research provide the usage of the affective evaluation system for acquiring the customers’ affective responses in the conceptual design process of a mobile phone. This design-generation process allows the design stakeholders to realize their customers’ affective responses interactively with sharing floating data among them according to the daily update of customer’s evaluations.