Sensory analysis as a support for strengthening the meta-design phase. Friendliness, affordance and experience

Everyday products are asked today to satisfy far more performances than in the past, starting from their ability to communicate on different levels, consciously or spontaneously, to the user. This attitude of the human centred project defines new requirements such as friendliness, affordance and a global satisfactory experience of the product itself, achievable by acting not just on the user experience, but also on the whole perception of the product, conveyed mainly by the five senses. This paper presents a novel design approach more attentive to the multisensory theme, providing it with the suggestion of a set of possible quali-quantitative tools able to support designers since the early phase of the good sensory design process. Furthermore, several innovative tools driven from the marketing research will be proposed for verifying the outputs of the design process. Finally several case studies of the possible achievements obtained with this approach in current researches in the field of multisensory product design adopting the disclosed tools will be presented.