An ontological approach to designers’ idea explanation style: Towards supporting the sharing of kansei-ideas in textile design

In human-centered design activities, each designer has his or her own ideas about emotional aspect (or kansei) of new products. It is a key issue to share this vague kansei-idea appropriately at the earliest stage of design activities. This paper shows a novel ontological engineering approach to support kansei-idea sharing. The approach focuses on an idea explanation style as the wisdom of the design team. Ontological engineering has been making contributions to systematize knowledge and vocabulary by modeling them. Needless to say, it is difficult to model the vague kansei-idea itself. However, if the modeled object is shifted from the kansei-idea to the kansei-idea explanation style, it can provide the benefit of modeling. We investigated the effectiveness of the ontological engineering approach, and concluded that to construct an ontological framework of designers’ explanations is especially useful regarding these points: clarification of the essence of the explanation style, discovery of problems in explanations, and analyzing difficulties in acquiring explanation style for novices. From the investigation, what we can support and how a support system should be designed became clear. Furthermore, we built a kansei-idea sharing support system, and obtained the results of its initial trials.