Sensory Evaluation of Commercial Truck Interiors

Vehicle interior harmony is related to human factors but it deals with human emotional attachment to the product. Kansei, or sensory engineering provides an effective approach to address harmony issues. This paper reports a preliminary investigation of human sensory evaluation of commercial truck interiors, especially the door interiors. To investigate the end users' needs and preference, a questionnaire survey was administered to twenty-six commercial truck drivers. Responses on usability, styling, harmony, and ergonomics issues of each driver's own truck were recorded. Furthermore, a set of 12 semantic differential scales, together with a preference ranking scale, was served to evaluate six truck door interiors. Results show that commercial truck drivers are more concerned with functionality and usability than styling and visual harmony. However, concerns on interior styling and harmony represent more than one-third of the design issues reported by the participants, indicating that interior harmony issues should not be overlooked. Three factors of door interior visual harmony were identified: color and emotion, geometric shape, and spatial arrangement. The color and emotion factor showed a high correlation with preference ranking merit value. Future work will be carried out to associate principal harmony factors with design parameters of door interiors.