Applying intuitive thinking in smart home design based on semantic association

Abstract

With the advance of Industry 4.0, the merging of automation and information has become an important trend of product design. Smart home products are increasingly valued and favored by consumers. However, the existing smart home product design mainly focuses on the product performance and technology sense and often ignores the users’ emotional and spiritual needs, which may increase the users’ cognitive difficulty and reduce users’ satisfaction. Good products should not only meet the needs of usage, but also to take the user’s psychological factors into consideration, accordingly to enrich the emotional experience of users. Household products are closely related to the users’ life. When using the household products, users are more likely to use the visual intuitive thinking mode, thereby giving the product a special emotional meaning. This paper takes the innovation design of water equipment in kitchen as an example. After fully understanding the users’ imaging and description about the future kitchen, it extracts key words such as “cleanness” that the users generally think can represent the future kitchen, to guide the user to start the semantic association and establish the users’ semantic schema. Also, this paper uses the Evaluation Grid Method (EGM) to link the images produced by intuitionistic association with the design elements of products, and put forward the product design principles in line with the users’ intuitive thinking to establish a product design framework based on semantic association. By testing the concept design product in practice, it proves that this framework can improve the users’ satisfaction with the product. This paper proposes that the product design process should take full account of human factors, and that the users’ intuitive thinking habits should be applied to product design, which provides a reference for innovative design of smart home products.