• Korean Institute of Interior Design Journal
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• v.22 no.6
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• pp.130-139
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• 2013

The purpose of this study is to analyze the characteristics of Korean sofa design in 2013 and understand the change of it in comparison with the characteristics of sofa in 2001. For the sake of it, this study analyzed the styles, forms, materials, colors and composition of 220 sofas posted on 7 main furniture companies' internet homepage of Korea, and used the results of the previous study for the materials in 2001. As the results of analysis, the style of furniture was almost modern and there was much of lineal in the form of sofa, rather than curved. The percentage of using leather for main material of sofa was greatly increased compared with 2001. In case of minor material, there was difference in each company in percentage of using wood and metal. The use of brown color was greatly increased compared with 2001, and the diversification of color use was reduced. The percentage of using a single color gets increased compared with 2001, but the cases of strong contrast were more than that of weak contrast. The percentage of sofa for 3 people gets lowered compared with 2001, and the case of sofa for 4 people gets greatly increased. In case of auxiliary component, the use of couch and stool, which were almost not used in 2001, gets more increased than sofa for single, with many cases of using the corner, though small. In conclusion, the characteristics of Korean sofa design are diversification of the sofa configuration, the tendency of high-quality sofa, and simplification and concentration of the sofa design.

• Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.81-89
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• 2007

The purpose of this study is to develop data base and interface for sofa consumers and sofa designers. The human sensibility ergonomics method was used to find the consumer needs and Quality Function Deployment (QFD) method was used to extract the designing characteristics required for sofa production. About 200 words and 100 images were gathered from sofa and furniture related catalogs and internet sites to find the best emotional words and images that can express the various sofa aspect. Among the collected words and images, 34 emotional words were selected for sensibility experiment according to the opinions of experts, relations of closeness and frequency of use, and 50 images were selected for the experiment by the diversity. Selected words and images were used for the semantic differential method with 94 subjects, and sensibility characteristics of sofas were defined through various statistical analysis methods including basic statistical analysis, factor analysis and multi-dimensional scale. In reflecting design characteristics of sofas, design factors of sofas were divided into backrest, seat, armrest, neck support and leg, and relative importance of each factor for design was determined with analytic hierarchy process (AHP) by utilizing the experts' opinions. Based on the results above, relationship analysis between emotional evaluation results and design factors was performed. Also, as various sofa images are presented diagrammatically through multidimensional scaling method, it can be used as an important tool for the development of sofa design. This study will contribute improving the product quality of sofas as it enables applying consumer needs into the sofa design.

• Journal of the Korea Furniture Society
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.1-10
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• 2008

The shift to more practical and simpler lifestyle in the modern society is well reflected in people's preference when it comes to living room space and sofa designs. These elements are intentionally crafted to satisfy the customers' personal needs and wants, sense of comfort, aesthetic preference, and function. This study includes an analysis on the development and conceptualization of sofa designs, exterior materials, and colors of the furniture released by Hanssem, Livart, Borneo, Emons, and Jangin Furniture during the first half of 2007. Modern and practical sofas should be essentially designed according to the customers' demand and current trend. Such design principle is necessary to achieve and maintain competitiveness in the globalizing society.

• Journal of the Korea Furniture Society
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.125-130
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• 2001

The sofa industry, which is now one of the major furniture industries in Korea, has developed since 1970s as the apartment building boom and the rise of living standards triggered its demand. Among others, durable and high-quality leather sofa had been most favored and excelled other sofas since mid-1980s along with the growth of national economy before IMF control tightened money market in late 1990s. Leather sofa is still favored and its industry has great possibilities to increase as people tend to seek higher and more personalized living conditions with the stabilization of economy. However, there are several problems in the sofa industry due to the current economic difficult conditions, i.e.; 1. It is hard to cut down the cost of raw material as the supply mostly depend on import. 2. It is hard to keep product quality due to technical difficulties. 3. There are still illegal duplicates of foreign or domestic competitors'design. The aim of this study is to examine the reality of the leather sofa industry in Korea and to suggest new vision for its progress.

• Journal of the Korea Furniture Society
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.16-26
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• 2017

In today's aging society, stable residential environment is essential for the elderly living alone to be able to do activities of daily living without restrictions and cherish a satisfactory quality of life. We developed a safe and convenient multifunctional sofa by removing complex combinations and decomposing processes of the multifunctional transformable furniture, appropriate for the use by elderly living alone. We deduced the 4 main keywords and details related to the purpose of sofa by analyzing the users' physical and mental characteristics through literature review and by using 24-hour scheduling, interviews, and actual measurement. Finally, by applying this to furniture planning, we designed 4 different types of multifunctional sofa system. Production was done in cooperation with AND Co. for 2 weeks using materials, colors and adhesives selectively chosen with careful consideration of their effects on the physical, mental aspects of the user to give optimal comfortability.

• Journal of the Korea Furniture Society
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.55-62
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• 2006

This was a systemized bed consisted of storage units, a desk, a drawer, a sofa and a shelf. This bed system was not designed only for a certain age group of children but also for various age groups of children, since each parts of the bed can be sued separately. Separation of parts of the bed allowed children to decorate their own living space and gives them a chance to express their own feeling and thoughts by layout of parts. Design adopts the beauty of nature such as smoothly curve lines which are perfectly fit for the children's living space. The moving sofa located under the bed and the book shelf lead children to establish a pattern of reading habit. The draw and storage units offer nice space for keeping children's goods.

• Journal of Advanced Engineering and Technology
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.259-265
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• 2018

In this paper, we propose a test method to evaluate the reliability of the recliner sofa in the early stage of production. In order to develop the test method, we analyzed the failure mechanism occurring in the field and designed the performance test, environmental test, accelerated life test methods based on the analysis of failure mechanism. The failure mechanism is reproduced by applying the designed test. The reliability of the recliner sofa can be verified at the production stage through the proposed test method.

• Journal of the Korea Furniture Society
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• v.27 no.4
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• pp.309-317
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• 2016

Recently, Korean society is increaseing "1 person family" phenomenon, which is influenced by changing of young peoples' value, aging society and social economic problems. Increase of single households is a result of complex economic, cultural and social factors. It is because as the individual's financial independence increases due to elevated income and education level, the age of marriage is going up and the individualism, which values the individual's value rather than custom, is spreading. Therefore, this new phenomenon will be impact to between social, economic value structure and living space. An increase with small furnitures are also increasing of R&D and marketing plans for 1 person family. Currently, 1 person family is bigger than last decade and that is requiring more suitable and multi-functional furniture for them. However, in Korea furniture companies are more optimization to traditional family size. Thus, this research explore about developing cheap price sofa bed, which is using at narrow area and small place.

• Journal of the Korea Furniture Society
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.91-100
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• 2011

Communication has increasingly become important between peoples in the modern society. The change in the composition of a family brought by urbanization and industrialization caused structural changes in the society, and the lack of communication between people have incited various social conflicts rising from individualism and ego-centrism. Thus in this era, domestic environment is one of the most significant environment that enables one to transform into an appropriate member of the social community as well as develop appropriate traits of one. The living room, which served as an arena of communication for family members is now replaced with TV, a popular media, and has lost its original role in the house. The living room furnitures today are designed to facilitate people in viewing TV, not to enhance communication between family members. Thus in this research, I would like to propose a new concept of 'communication furniture' and various examples to suggest appropriate, desired role of living room furniture in households today. In addition, I hope this research contributes to forming a beneficial living room culture and a domestic environment as well as a heart-warming, human society.

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.163-170
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• 2021

Smart-textronics technology which enables functional textiles has recently been applied in various fields such as smart clothes, smart home and smart health care, and a variety of smart-textronics products have been developed. In this context, the smart-textronics product development process is proposed based on the systematic participatory design method in this paper. The proposed method consists of two phases: in-depth interviews and analyzing. In the phase of in-depth interviews, participants are asked to create journey maps that include activities, pain points and emotional status and to generate solution ideas with sketches and simple prototypes. In the analyzing phase, design researchers investigate the participants' journey maps, and create personas by identifying critical characteristics with the behavior pattern analysis. Then, each persona's needs are linked with value elements of the E3 value framework. Finally, pre-survey was conducted to identify smart-textronics market and a smart sofa design is proceeded as the case study to show the applicability of the proposed method.