Application of a PSO–FAHP-based evaluation system for office chair design demand analysis

Existing studies on office chair evaluation often emphasize either general furniture attributes or isolated performance indicators, limiting their usefulness for systematic design decision-making. To address this issue, this study proposes a demand-oriented evaluation framework for office chair products by integrating particle swarm optimization (PSO) with the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP). Based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, office chair user requirements were identified and organized using the KJ method to establish a hierarchical evaluation index system. FAHP was applied to determine criterion weights under fuzzy judgment conditions, and PSO was used to improve matrix consistency and weighting stability. A fuzzy comprehensive evaluation was then conducted for four selected representative office chair alternatives. The results showed that safety requirements had the highest weight, followed by basic functional and engineering requirements, while aesthetic and innovation-related requirements were less important. Among the four alternatives, Design Case A obtained the highest score under the selected criteria, weights, evaluators, and scoring scale. The findings suggest that office chair evaluation depends primarily on lower-order requirements related to use, support, and reliability, rather than on higher-order experiential attributes. The proposed PSO-FAHP framework offers a practical method for office chair assessment and a structured basis for requirement-oriented design decision-making.