Industrial product form design has become consumer-centred. Affective responses related to consumers' affective needs are considered invaluable for product form design and have attracted increasing attention. When designing product forms, designers should thoroughly understand the design knowledge concerning multiple affective responses and design variables. This paper proposes a systematic approach to extraction of design knowledge by using multiobjective optimisation and rough sets. Design analysis is first employed to determine design variables and multiple affective responses. As per the results, a multiobjective optimisation model is constructed that involves optimising the multiple affective responses. An improved version of the strength Pareto evolutionary algorithm (SPEA2) is adopted to solve the multiobjective optimisation model and generate the Pareto optimal solutions. Based on these Pareto optimal solutions, rough sets are employed to extract design knowledge that is common to these Pareto optimal solutions. A car profile design was employed as a case study to illustrate the proposed approach. The results suggest that the proposed approach is time-and cost-efficient and can effectively extract design knowledge that provides suitable insight into product form design.traditional approach for solving an MOP involves integrating multiple objectives into a single-objective and then using the optimisation algorithm to derive a single optimal solution (Guo et al., 2014;Hsiao et al., 2010); that is, the MOP is converted into a single-objective optimisation problem. This approach is simple and efficient; however, its limitations prevent consideration of all possible solutions, and it cannot provide sufficient knowledge regarding design variables and affective responses. Thus, the traditional optimisation approach constrains their usefulness to designers (Shieh et al., 2017). By contrast, a multiobjective optimisation approach does not require the integration of multiple objectives and can provide numerous Pareto optimal solutions. Based on these Pareto optimal solutions, designers can extract knowledge for product form design (Deb and Srinivasan, 2006).Rough sets are an effective and systematic method for knowledge discovery. They can be used to analyse all types of data, including linear and nonlinear data (Nagamachi et al., 2006). The main difference between rough sets and other approaches coping with uncertain problems is that rough sets do not require any prior information beyond the problem itself . Because of these advantages, rough sets have been used in many studies for extracting design knowledge . Zhai et al. (2009b) employed rough sets to analyse the imprecise affective responses of consumers and acquire design knowledge for improving consumer satisfaction with product design. Shi et al. (2012) used rough sets to reduce the design variables of product form design and then employed association rule mining to extract design principles. In this study, we used rough sets to extract design knowledge from...