Today, as technology advances and market competition for products intensifies, the product design to improve customer satisfaction by accurately identifying customer needs is emerging as a very important issue for company. Accordingly, the customer-oriented or customer-centered design that maximizes customer satisfaction by grasping and analyzing customer requirements is in the spotlight as an important design theory. In this study, the customer-oriented design is defined as finding the optimal value of design variable with the maximum overall customer satisfaction while minimizing the difference in individual customer satisfaction responded to various customers from multiple product quality characteristics from the perspective of robust design. Therefore, this study presents a new method for modeling the customer preference structure as the different sets of desirability functions for multiple quality characteristics and proposes a new customer-oriented design approach by applying the desirability functions to Taguchi’s robust design process to deal with multi-characteristic design problem. Finally, the proposed method is illustrated with the Kansei engineering design problem of wine glass.

Today, as technology advances and market competition for products intensifies, the design to improve product satisfaction by accurately identifying customer requirements is emerging as a very important problem for company. Accordingly, Customer-Oriented Design, that maximizes customer satisfaction by grasping and analyzing customer requirements, is in the spotlight as an important design theory. In this study, Customer- Oriented Design is defined as finding the optimal value of the design variable with the maximum overall customer satisfaction while minimizing the difference in individual customer satisfaction responded to various customers from multiple product quality characteristics from the perspective of robust design. Therefore, in this work, we present a new method for generating a Desirability Function for each quality characteristic to deal with the multi characteristic parameter design with multiple quality characteristics. And we propose a new Customer-Oriented Design methodology that applies these Desirability Functions to Taguchi’s parameter design process.