Toward Emotional Design Feature Evaluation in Craft Development: Understanding the Top-Selling Chinese and Japanese Ceramic Teapots

Crafts are products with both functional and aesthetic properties. Through emotional design, we can enhance not only the functionality of craft products but also their aesthetic appeal. This study focuses on ceramic teapots as a case study, selecting 20 samples from top-selling Chinese and Japanese ceramic teapots on JD.com. Employing machine learning methods, this study explores the relationship between the design features of ceramic teapots and the emotional preferences of young consumers. A classification model was developed, and new teapots were designed for validation. The main findings are as follows: 1) The shape of the teapot lid, spout, handle, and body, as well as the color, decoration, and usability of the teapot, significantly influence young people’s emotional preferences. 2) Model evaluation revealed that the accuracies of the binary and ternary classification models established through random forest reached 91.0% and 81.3%, respectively. 3) The proportion of newly designed teapots that aligned with young people’s emotional preferences reached 91.1% (binary classification) and 64.5% (ternary classification), which are higher than those for the original 20 teapots. In conclusion, this study demonstrates that the relationship between the perceived image and design features of top-selling Chinese and Japanese ceramic teapots can effectively guide the design of ceramic teapot forms and successfully convey the intended image. The established model can be used to evaluate the emotional quality of newly designed teapots, providing data-driven support for designers to create ceramic teapots that resonate with market preferences.