Fumio Terauchi

Undergraduate Students Designing Environmental Concern Products: A Case Study in Design Education

This paper analyzes experimental learning based on pedagogical case studies that propose practical designs with a sustainable approach. The research has limited resources, time, and scale of context. According to the activities and attitudes of the student team, they expressed strong interest in exploring the possibilities of sustainable design rather than in eco-design principles. They showed interest in focusing on sustainable consumption and consequently leaned toward a sociocultural rather than a technological eco-design approach in their works. Students faced real-world sustainability issues, providing a great opportunity for them to discuss between themselves as well as with the public.

Product Subjective Sustainability: Analysis of the Japanese Users’ Kansei Evolutions over their Short/Long-lived Products’ Lifetimes

Focusing on the subjective side of product sustainability and considering the lack of a wide expression to encompass product subjective issues that contribute to products’ longevity with regard to sustainability values, the present work proposes the concept of Product Subjective Sustainability (PSjS) to particularly indicate ‘the emotional, affective and/or aesthetical capability of a product to satisfyingly and pleasantly last during its expected long/short lifetime’. Aiming to expand this concept experientially by using the Kansei Engineering approach, this paper presents the process and results of an analytical study on the evolution of Japanese users’ Kansei toward their short/long-lived product during its entire lifetime. The specified short and long lived product types for this analytical study are, respectively, mobile phone, private passenger car and Japanese handicraft or traditional furniture. As the main outcome of this analysis, the Kansei structures and the trends of PSjS are drawn and compared between these products.

Two vibration modes of a human body sitting on a car seat: the relationship between riding discomfort affected by the material properties of the seat cushion and the two vibration modes

The relationship between the properties of flexible polyurethane foam composing seat cushions for standard cars and the riding discomfort evaluated by subjects who sat on the seat were investigated. The properties of five kinds of polyurethane foam were measured using the DMA to define dynamical properties. Riding discomfort was subjectively evaluated by 17 subjects at four frequencies, and the correlation coefficients between the material properties and riding discomfort were analyzed. The results suggested that there were two relationships between material properties and riding discomfort, and that these relationships strongly relied on frequency. Furthermore, a digital human model was created to confirm the influence of frequency on these relationships, which suggested that the relationships affected sensitivity by the change in the vibration mode of the human body-seat vibration system.