Kansei engineering

Kansei engineering (Japanese: 感性工学 kansei kougaku, emotional or affective engineering) aims at the development or improvement of products and services by translating the customer's psychological feelings and needs into the domain of product design (i.e. parameters). It was founded by Mitsuo Nagamachi, Professor Emeritus of Hiroshima University (also former Dean of Hiroshima International University and CEO of International Kansei Design Institute). Kansei engineering parametrically links the customer's emotional responses (i.e. physical and psychological) to the properties and characteristics of a product or service. In consequence, products can be designed to bring forward the intended feeling. It has now been adopted as one of the topics for professional development by the Royal Statistical Society. Product design on today's markets has become increasingly complex since products contain more functions and have to meet increasing demands such as user-friendliness, manufacturability and ecological considerations. With a shortened product lifecycle, development costs are likely to increase. Since errors in the estimations of market trends can be very expensive, companies therefore perform benchmarking studies that compare with competitors on strategic, process, marketing, and product levels. However, success in a certain market segment not only requires knowledge about the competitors and the performance of competing products, but also about the impressions which a product leaves to the customer. The latter requirement becomes much more important as products and companies are becoming mature. Customers purchase products based on subjective terms such as brand image, reputation, design, impression etc.. A large number of manufacturers has started to consider such subjective properties and develop their products in a way that conveys the company image. A reliable instrument is therefore needed: an instrument which can predict the reception of a product on the market before the development costs become too large. This demand has triggered the research dealing with the translation of the customer's subjective, hidden needs into concrete products. Research is done foremost in Asia, including Japan and Korea. In Europe, a network has been forged under the 6th EU framework. This network refers to the new research field as 'emotional design' or 'affective engineering'. Nowadays, people want to use products that are functional at the physical level, usable at the psychological level and attractive at the subjective, emotional level. Affective engineering is the study of the interactions between the customer and the product at that third level. It focuses on the relationships between the physical traits of a product and its affective influence on the user. Thanks to this field of research, it is possible to gain knowledge on how to design more attractive products and make the customers satisfied. Methods in affective engineering (or Kansei engineering) is one of the major areas of ergonomics (human factor engineering ). The study of integrating affective values in artefacts is not new at all. Already in the 18th century philosophers such as Baumgarten and Kant established the area of aesthetics. In addition to pure practical values, artefacts always also had an affective component. One example is jewellery found in excavations from the stone ages. The period of Renaissance is also a good example. In the middle of the 20th century, the idea of aesthetics was deployed in scientific contexts. Charles E. Osgood developed his semantic differential method in which he quantified the peoples' perceptions of artefacts. Some years later, in 1960, Professors Shigeru Mizuno and Yoji Akao developed an engineering approach in order to connect peoples' needs to product properties. This method was called quality function deployment (QFD). Another method, the Kano model, was developed in the field of quality in the early 1980s by Professor Noriaki Kano, of Tokyo University. Kano's model is used to establish the importance of individual product features for the customer's satisfaction and hence it creates the optimal requirement for process oriented product development activities. A pure marketing technique is conjoint analysis. Conjoint analysis estimates the relative importance of a product's attributes by analysing the consumer's overall judgment of a product or service. A more artistic method is called Semantic description of environments. It is mainly a tool for examining how a single person or a group of persons experience a certain (architectural) environment.