Developing a mapping from affective words to design parameters for affective design of apparel products

The development of an emotion-based (or affect-based) apparel design system has become an important issue nowadays due to the customer's increased demand for apparel products not only in the aspect of function but also of aesthetics or affect/emotion. This paper presents a study on developing a mapping from affective words to design parameters. The technique employed to develop this mapping is neural networks (NNs). Both linear NNs and higher-order NNs were applied. An example was taken to illustrate and validate the developed mapping. There are two main contributions from the study. The first is that this mapping is the first in the domain of apparel design, and with it, the computer-aided affect-based design for apparel becomes possible. The second one is the provision of some empirical knowledge for the evaluation of so-called higher-order NNs.