To develop successful products the "Voice of the Customer " must be explicitly considered in the design process. The House of Quality (HOQ) is an increasingly popular structured methodology for ensuring customer focus. Two important steps of the product development process in which the HOQ is used are (1) setting engineering targets and (2) identifying the inherent tradeoffs in a design. The author believes that these two activities cannot be performed reliably in actual practice unless the HOQ is used in conjunction with objective engineering models of product performance linked mathematically to a new HOQ called the "Perceptual House of Quality" (House 0). In this thesis the author substantiates this claim using an disguised example drawn from a real design project. The potential benefits of augmenting the HOQ with mathematical formalism (maps), engineering models and auxiliary models are explained.
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