Comfort driven design of innovative products: the case of the personalized mattress

The application of ergonomic principles to the design of processes, workplaces and organizations is not only a way to respond to legal requirements but also an indispensable premise for any company seeking to pursue a business logic. The evolution of Human-centred design brings designers to focus their attention not only to the ergonomic performances of products and processes but, also, to the wellbeing of the customer/worker when interacts with the product. This wellbeing is often translated as the state of perceived (dis)comfort while performing an action. So, in recent years, methods that allow for an objective evaluation of perceived comfort, in terms of postural, physiological, cognitive and environmental comfort, have received a great deal of attention from researchers. The need to have an objective method to evaluate the (dis)comfort perception is definitively due to the will of introducing the comfort evaluation in the early stage of the product development plan, and the necessity to imagine and develop new methods for a preventive evaluation (often made on the digital model of the product) of the future perception of (dis)comfort of the customer. This works deal with the experience of designing an innovative product whose product-development-plan is centred on the customer perceived comfort: a personalized mattress. The mattress is the typical product whose relevance in everyday life of people is under-evaluated. People usually spend from 1/4 to 1/3 of their life on it, but nobody spends more than some minutes for choosing the right one when buying it. Fortunately, this trend is quickly changing and the customer pays more attention and takes information about producers and product characteristics before to buy a product. This trend is more evident in the market of high-performance (that means high price) mattress. Valflex is the luxury brand of Rinaldi Group S.r.l., one of the main player in the world of luxury mattresses’ manufacturing companies. This company, together with University of Salerno, has developed methodologies both in terms of preventive comfort evaluation and in comfort-driven design. This work explains the results obtained through the profitable collaboration that allowed to develop two patents and a new reconfigurable mattress, easy to manufacture, whose layout can be tuned on the anthropometric data of the customer to improve the comfort experience during the sleep.