Kansei Information Processes in Early Design: Design Cognition and Computation - Emotional Engineering - page 59

the designer's cognitive and affective processes becomes a major topic for many
scienti ! c communities such as design science, cognitive psychology, computer
science, and arti ! cial intelligence. This growing interest is partly due to a certain
pressure coming from the industrial context where shortening the development
durations and increasing the variability of the offer, lead to the formalization and
digitization of the earliest phases of the design process. In this context, the domain
of kansei in early design tends to be developed with the de ! nition of new models
and tools that will help to progressively digitize the early design process. Our
research follows three sequential steps which are, at ! first, the formalization of
kansei information, secondly the extraction of kansei rules and skills, and ! finally
their transfer toward formats that can be implemented by design algorithms.
The following study relates an experiment we led previously with professional
designers in car design and in product design. In a ! first time, we investigate kansei
information. In a second time, we formalize the relations which exist inside of this
information and how they are transformed in different states.
Kansei information processing (see Fig. 2 ) is considered from the ! first phase of
inspiration and information gathering, where some multisensory information is
selected, captured, picked, and gathered from the external world, to the one of
explicit concepts generation, after building a coherent mental representation, which
is by nature implicit, and contains the source and the target, in other terms the
problem and the solution. This process involves so a succession of implicit and
explicit information processing.
Fig. 2 Kansei information
processing