In our daily lives, we often use onomatopoeia to convey images of products. However, the correspondence between onomatopoeia and physical quantities is not clear. To apply onomatopoeia to product design, we focused on the relationship between the sound symbolism of onomatopoeia and product sound quality. The target of the evaluation was the operation sound of the rotary switch. A subjective evaluation experiment was conducted in which participants were asked to free answer to the impressions associated with the operation sounds using onomatopoeic expressions. The obtained onomatopoeia was then analyzed by quantitative text analysis using mora as the unit of analysis. The results showed the voiced consonants appeared more frequently in the louder operation sounds. In addition, the vowel /o/ appeared more frequently in sounds with low sharpness, and the vowel /i/ appeared more frequently in sounds with high sharpness. Since these trends are similar to other studies on sound symbolism, this study shows the possibility of using onomatopoeia in product design by utilizing sound symbolism.

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During push switch operation, tactile feedback is crucial in determining whether the operation will be successful. However, to enhance the tactile feedback and ensure usability, the actuation force should not increase. Herein, a method to improve tactile feedback during switch operation by designing the operating sound is proposed. In the first experiment, to investigate the acoustic characteristics of high feedback operating sound, participants evaluated recorded commercial push switch operating sounds through headphones using the semantic differential method. Results showed that the operating sound with a short decay time and high loudness value in the highfrequency band exhibited a highly intelligible impression. Furthermore, the push switch operation exhibited two sounds (push and release), whose contribution to the impression was determined based on their loudness. In the second experiment, participants evaluated their impressions when operating push switches, which comprised various combinations of operating sound volume and actuation force. Results showed that highly intelligible sound improved the tactile feedback. Moreover, it was found that considering the balance between the operating sound volume and actuation force is necessary to improve the switch operation feedback through the operating sound. These findings can aid in enhancing the feedback of devices that require switches with low actuation force due to design constraints.

This paper reports a natural ventilation silencer for an animal cage having considerable sound insertion loss.Many veterinary hospitals face a serious problem that hospitalized animals are stressed from the barks of other dogs in the hospital. To address this problem, a solution that barely affects caged dogs' health is required. First, we estimated aperture ratio of the silencer device which was considered by physiological sustainability of dog. Next, we attempted to use a silencer with sound insertion loss by attaching it to an opening side of the cage. We constructed the tested prototype silencers by using the resonance of a rectangular room and a nonwoven fabric. We measured the acoustic characteristics of the silencers that were attached to the real scale model of the animal cage. We also measured their insertion loss by considering the estimated frequency characteristics of the dogs' barking sound. The result shows that proposed silencers have more than 10 dB insertion loss; therefore, they can maintain respiratory environment of a caged dogs along with good visibility.

To apply onomatopoeia to product design, we investigated the relationship between the sound symbolism of onomatopoeia and physical quantities. The target of evaluation was the operating tactile sensation of rotary switches. First, a subjective evaluation experiment was conducted in which participants were asked to provide free answers using onomatopoeic expressions related to their impressions of the operating tactile sensation. The obtained onomatopoeia was analyzed by quantitative text analysis using mora as the unit of analysis, and it was found that the phonemes of onomatopoeia used by the participants differed depending on the magnitude of the click torque of switches. Next, we examined the impressions of the onomatopoeia when the click torque of the rotary switch was sequentially changed via 7-point scale evaluation experiments. As a result, the correspondence between tactile sensation and onomatopoeia was grasped quantitatively. This paper shows that onomatopoeia can be used for quantitative product design.