Abstract
It is known from consumer surveys that the interior design of cars greatly influences on consumers' affection. Most notably, the instrument panel which occupies the driver's attention while driving would be one of the main components that affect consumer's affection, but the designer does not often put due importance to this design component. The purpose of this study is to define consumers' affection on the instrument cluster panel in terms of its design factors: color of panel lighting and layout of meters as independent factors. Semantic differentials or affective adjectives that are related to the instrument panel were first derived from surveys, existing studies and the available literature. Then, representative affective factors were drawn using factor analysis and multi-dimensional scaling (MDS). Evaluation of the instrument panel was performed and analyzed by Taguchi's robust design to provide more robust results under various noise factors which are color and material of car interior. Experiment revealed that consumers had five affective factors on the instrument panel and luxurious, charming, and visible affections are grouped into a factor and unique and dynamic affections in another factor. Evaluation of the instrument panel by Taguchi's robust design found that the white color of panel lighting and the panel with four meters was the most preferred design in terms of both the affection of luxury and uniqueness.
