Engineering Design Centre
Affective Engineering
The analysis of the products' physical features in relation to the emotional and sub conscious minds of the consumer or end user.
What is it?
Affective engineering is the study of the relationships between physical and rational products features and their subjective cognitive or emotional influences on the people interacting with them, and the use of the knowledge gained to design more satisfying products.
Today's consumers are rarely satisfied with products that have only functional and ergonomic attributes, they demand that they experience delight from the items that surround them, and this is becoming the critical factor that determines an products acceptance or success. Creating emotionally appealing merchandise is currently more art than science and is reliant on the creativity of an individual. Success rates of new products are generally very low, between 10% to 20% and are therefore costly and high risk.
There is a real opportunity to create added value in a product by creating and enhancing the intangible asset of 'customer appeal'. This has led to a major collaborative initiative between the Engineering Design CIC through the Keyworth Institute at Leeds and Faraday Packaging Partnership to develop novel design techniques. The technology could provide a systematic approach to combine psychology with engineering, so enabling products that not only work but also, have an innate emotional appeal and enhanced wow factor.
Research in this area is by necessity interdisciplinary and as such the Engineering Design Centre is well placed to facilitate the work. Recent capital investment in human-factors design and evaluation laboratories at the University of Leeds has led to an increase in work in this area, some questions addressed to date are:
- How can one product's aesthetic be embedded in another's?
- How much can the shape of a brand product be changed before it is no longer recognised?
- Do men and women rank the visual impact of a product's features in the same order?
- How can consumer purchase decisions be influenced by product form?
- What aspects of a surface's finish make it pleasant or unpleasant?
Provides a fully integrated approach to developing and manufacturing products or components from initial design through to completion using advanced disciplines including virtual prototyping and lean manufacturing techniques.
What is it?
Design for Manufacture and Assembly allows you to ask "what if" questions about your product design, and get immediate, accurate answers. These answers that can be used to make solid business decisions while reducing costs, increasing quality, and shortening development cycles.
You can analyze your current designs and your new designs, quickly determining how to simplify the design for significant cost savings. You can explore various manufacturing processes and materials. As you do, the concurrent costing module instantly shows you the cost ramifications of your design decisions.
What are the benefits?
Design for Manufacture and Assembly product simplification and cost analysis tools have many direct business benefits. Companies have seen large scale savings from their product manufacturing costs while creating products that are easier to manufacture and maintain. The direct benefits to companies include:
- Supply chain cost management
- Product simplification and improved quality
- Improved communication between design, manufacturing, purchasing, and management
- Cutting manufacturing and assembly costs