A Kansei system to support children´s clothing design in Malaysia

Often consumer´s definition of design concepts conflicts with designer´s idea, and this has always caused confusions. In the context of product emotion, this work strives to understand consumer´s emotional responses towards designs, and investigate how differences of designs affect emotions. This paper reports work to explore potential to design a recommender system for children´s clothing in Malaysia with the implementation of Kansei Engineering. In the system, the knowledge base is formed from the Kansei evaluation and analysis procedure that are anticipated to provide data such as the semantic Kansei, the design influence and the specimen´s Kansei. The result shows that Malaysian´s consumer´s Kansei in children´s clothing could be classified into forty clusters and the Kansei design could be structured by five concepts. Strong relations between Kansei and specimen could be determined, and design influence could be identified by Partial Least Square Analysis. Inference rules for the system are set to include age group, price range and occasion. With the result successfully obtained from Kansei evaluation and analysis, the paper proposes a recommender system that could be of importance to support the design process of children´s clothing in Malaysia. The system could also be used to facilitate consumers in objectively describing their desired clothing design to designers as well as retailers to avoid misunderstanding.