Kansei Engineering - History of (Kansei) Affective Engineering

History of (Kansei) Affective Engineering

Nowadays, people want to use products that should be functional at a physical level, usable at a psychological level and should be attractive at a 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 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.Kansei engineering is one of the major area of ergonomics (human factor engineering ). The area of integrating affective values in artifacts 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, artifacts always also had an affective component . One example is jewellery found in excavations from the stone ages. Also the period of renaissance is a good example of that. In the middle of the 19th century, the idea of aesthetics was deployed in scientific contexts. Charles E Osgood developed his Semantic Differentials Method in which he quantified the peoples’ perceptions of artifacts . 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 analyzing 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. Although all of these methods are concerned with subjective impact, none of them can translate this impact to design parameters sufficiently. This can, however, be accomplished by Kansei Engineering. Kansei Engineering (KE) has been used as a tool for affective engineering. It was developed in the early 70s in Japan and is now widely spread among Japanese companies. In the middle of the 90s, the method spread to the United States, but cultural differences may have prevented the method to enfold its whole potential.