Designing Train Passenger Seat by Kansei Engineering in Indonesia

Public transport adoption is still major problem in Indonesia. Integrating impression and emotion to service may change the image of public transport, leading to fast adoption rate. As product development technique, Kansei Engineering is well known to facilitate that integration. This paper communicates the implementation of Kansei Engineering (KE) in designing train passenger seat in Indonesia. The train between Bandung-Solo (8 hours journey) was chosen to be the investigated object. The train was selected to be refurbished by introducing a new passenger seat design, emphasizing on the improvement of passenger experience. As the first step of KE type I technique, travel experience of the existing passengers were taken into the consideration for selecting Kansei words. It was found that the relevant Kansei words to design passenger train seat in Indonesia were: comfort, people-friendly, multifunction, safe, soft, spacious, relaxing, superior, maintainable, strong, producible, minimalist, attractive, modern, unique, and durable. Upon understanding the semantic meaning of those words, physical properties and technical specification were produced by consulting to the related members. Finally, a passenger seat with synthetic leather cover, modular design, foldable table, individual power point, bluesilver color, and adjusted to Indonesian’s anthropometry data was proposed as the final design