VISUAL SENSITIVITY: COMMUNICATING POOR QUALITY

Visually perceived deviations from the nominal shapes, locations and orientations of parts can have negative impacts on the Visual Quality Appearance (VQA) of an assembled product. What deviations can be allowed without having extensive negative impacts on the VQA depends on the visual sensitivity of the design concept. Visual sensitivity has been defined as a product’s ability to visually amplify or suppress the lack of quality that could be visually perceived by a customer, due to geometrical variation. In this paper, we present and discuss visual sensitivity as a product property. Furthermore, we will regard visual sensitivity as the extent to which the nominal geometry of a product is communicated to an observer.