Simon Schütte

Concepts, methods and tools in Kansei engineering

Trends in product development today indicate that customers will find it hard to distinguish between many products due to functional equivalency. Customers will, therefore, base their decisions on more subjective factors. Moreover, in the future, products will consist, to a higher grade, of a combination of a tangible and intangible part. Kansei Engineering is a tool translating customers feelings into concrete product parameters and provides support for future product design. Presently, a total of six different types of Kansei Engineering are in use. The aim of this paper is to propose a framework in Kansei Engineering to facilitate the understanding of the different types of Kansei Engineering and to open Kansei Engineering for the integration of new tools. The new structure includes the choice of a product domain, which can be described from a physical and a semantic perspective as building a vector space in each. For the latter mentioned space, the Semantic Differential Method is used. In the next step, the two spaces are merged and a prediction model is built, connecting the Semantic Space and the Space of Product Properties together. The resulting prediction model has to be validated using different types of post-hoc tests.

Kanse/Affective engineering design: a methodology for profound affection and attractive quality creation

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to present and discuss the Kansei engineering (KE) methodology, and to reflect on the future development of KE. The paper presents a model of the KE methodolog ...

AFFECTIVE MEANING: THE KANSEI ENGINEERING APPROACH

Publisher Summary In the beginning of the 1970s, the concept of Kansei Engineering was introduced in Japan. Kansei Engineering can be defined as a product development methodology that translates customers’ and users’ feelings, impressions, and emotions into concrete design parameters. This chapter provides a background to Kansei Engineering and examples of how it may be used. Some of the application areas that are covered are quality feeling, driving feeling of vehicles, and the subjective impression of comfort and safety. In Japanese, Kansei is the concept of sensing a situation or an artifact and building an individual emotional response. The term Kansei itself is a multifaceted expression that does not have a complete equivalent in the English language. There are many different approaches to translating the word Kansei. In the context of product development, the Kansei can be referred to as the impression somebody gets from a certain artifact, environment, or situation using all her or his senses of vision, hearing, feeling, smell, and taste, as well as her or his cognition. Kansei Engineering studies, in most cases, are performed with quantitative data and statistical tools. The basis of the method is the identification of the relationship between the affective impression of the users and the product design parameters. There is no problem in using qualitative data instead of quantitative data within the framework of Kansei Engineering. The use of Rough Set Analysis is a tool supporting such a study. The use of qualitative data enables a deeper understanding of complex relationships that form the basis of the reactions of the humans. The qualitative methods and the quantitative methods should be seen primarily as complements to one another. Many authors point to the advantages of combining a qualitative and a quantitative approach. In that way, better understanding of complex phenomena can be obtained.

People's Perceptions of the Visual Appearance of Wood Flooring : A Kansei Engineering Approach

Evaluations of products based on visual stimuli are at the same time both subjective and important. The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between the visual properties of wood flooring and people’s reactions to computer visualization of interior wood products. The research strategy involved showing digital pictures of the same room, but with different wood floorings. The impressions of potential consumers were measured by means of rating scales for each descriptive word. This was done using the method of Kansei engineering, in which statistical connections between properties and semantics (descriptions) were analyzed. The research presented here contributes to theory and practice in two important ways. First and most important, the study shows that the chosen method is suitable for measuring people’s preferences on visualizations of interior wood. Second, the results indicate that certain properties are important for a floor to be judged as ‘‘good-looking’’ and others for a floor to be deemed ‘‘modern’’ or ‘‘vivid.’’