On Uncertainties of Kansei in Kansei Engineering: A Fuzzy Linguistic Approach

Abstract

Kansei Engineering~(KE) has been developed as a methodology to deal with consumers' subjective impressions and images of a product into the design elements of a product. One central step amongst KE is to generate the Kansei profiles of the products. Kansei is a quite subjective, ambiguous, and uncertain concept, which is frequently represented in linguistic forms. Toward this end, this paper tries to cope thoroughly with the uncertainties of Kansei in KE. A probabilistic approach is proposed to generate Kansei profiles involving the ``individual" uncertainty, ``group" uncertainty, and the partial semantic overlapping of Kansei. Our approach results with a probability distribution on a set of linguistic Kansei labels.