Concept Design of a Railway Coach: Quality Elements Identification through a Kansei-VR Approach

This paper concerns the concept design phase of a new railway coach interior. The approach has two main novelties: the use of Kansei Engineering methodology to identify emotional users needs and the design of a participative session of quality evaluation in Virtual Reality laboratory to assess the optimal concept. In particular, through Kansei analysis become possible to find a significant relation between the Kansei Word Comfortable and the supports for standing passengers, by means of questionnaires submitted to the users. This result was achieved elaborating and collecting the data through some statistical methods. Different design solutions have been conceived varying the shape, the position and the colour of the supports following DOE methodology. Then the digital prototypes have been presented in the immersive environment of the VRTest Laboratory to expert users for quality assessment. At the end, through an optimal selection strategy of design factor levels and a confirmatory test, the best concept was conceived.