Developing a Labeled Affective Magnitude scale and Fuzzy Linguistic scale for tactile feeling

Affective design is the inclusion or representation of human emotions and subjective impressions in product design processes. In affective design, a number of different scales are commonly used to reveal and measure subjective emotions related to the design features of products. Osgood's Semantic Differential Scale (SDS) is one of the scales that has often been used for this purpose. However, there are some drawbacks in the SDS due to the ordinal nature of the scale that leads to losses or distortions of a significant amount of information and this makes it difficult to justify parametric statistical analysis. In this study, two scales, namely a Labeled Affective Magnitude (LAM) scale and a Fuzzy Linguistic scale, are developed. The LAM scale is an alternative scale based on magnitude estimation and has ratio properties. The Fuzzy Linguistic scale is an interval scale for which responses are linguistic descriptors that are identified with fuzzy numbers or intervals. The scales were developed for tactile feelings because they are an important factor in product evaluation. Statistical analysis was conducted to compare the scales. There was no significant difference between the newly constructed fuzzy scale and 11 point SDS, whereas there was a significant difference between the newly constructed LAM scale and 11 point SDS.