Abstract: As the main part of design display and evaluation, product three-dimensional (3D) form is the core object in affective product design. However, previous research has not yet addressed the development of technical models and method involving complete 3D surface data, and thus cannot guarantee the quality of affective product design. By using the techniques of triangular mesh model, spherical harmonic and conditional variational auto-encoder, this paper proposes a data-driven affective product design method composed of several technical models using complete 3D surface data. These models include: mathematical model for quantifying 3D form, recognition model for recognizing customer’s affective responses, and generative model for generating new 3D forms. For affective product design, the mathematical model achieves the acquisition and processing of complete 3D surface data, the recognition model improves the objectivity and accuracy of recognition by integrating the 3D form data into the calculation process of emotion recognition, and the generative model realizes the automatic generation of new 3D forms in response to emotional data based on the recognition results. Each model provides technical support for realizing the acquisition, processing and generation of complete 3D surface data of product form, and ensures the systematicness and completeness of the proposed method for the affective product design involving 3D form innovation. The feasibility of the method is verified by an example of car design, and the results show that it is an effective affective product design method involving 3D form innovation.
