New surface treatments, novel material developments, and improved quality control procedures and advanced metrology instrumentation create a possibility to further develop competitiveness by the selection of “optimal” surface features to a product.  The customers’ first apprehension of a product and the creation of desire is a very complex but tempting process to learn to master. The product appearance plays an important role in the judgement of a product, and the surface is, among form, colour, and material of greatest importance in creating a whole impression of a product. This work addresses this “partly possible” and “to a great extent impossible” task and is a novel approach to develop and join a traditional physical metrology frame-work with qualitative gradings of apprehended impressions and feelings of products with varying surface properties.

The aim of the study is to demonstrate the metrology framework linking measurable- and un-measurable properties of product surfaces to customer feeling/experience as exemplified by a set of industrial applications.  The results based on three case studies show that the usage of the "Kansei" method leads to an improved knowledge about surface features in relation to the customers’ demand as exemplified with “the sauna-“ and “the building exterior” surface cases.  Clear links between the expectations of the emotions linked to the products have been associated to the design variable -surface topography.

Future studies will be initiated based on the results in this work to further explore the possibilities with the tactile- and colour properties to further utilize the properties of surfaces as a strategic tool for product developers.