Research Methods for Postgraduates by Greenfield Tony; Greener Sue; & Sue Greener

Author:Greenfield, Tony; Greener, Sue; & Sue Greener
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781118762998
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated
Published: 2016-08-19T00:00:00+00:00

Quantitative approaches such as questionnaires overcome these difficulties (although they pose some others, the main one probably being the fact that they are necessarily reductionist).

Kansei engineering (KE) is a quantitative method used in emotional design and usually based on the use of questionnaires. The Japanese word kansei means sensitivity or sensibility. Simon Schütte (2005: p. 36) proposes the following explanation of kansei: ‘Kansei is an individual's subjective impression from a certain artifact, environment or situation using all the senses of sight, hearing, feeling, smell, taste and the sense of balance as well as recognition’. For example, a beautiful photograph of a landscape full of snow can elicit the kansei ‘calmness’. In a KE study, the main purpose is discovering which technical parameters of a product convey the chosen emotions. Imagine we are studying watches. We want to discover, say, that if the face of a watch is rectangular, the watch is perceived as being elegant. Or that analogue displays are perceived as classical, whereas digital displays are perceived as modern. In this way, we not only get information about the specific watches used in the study, but also discover general rules that are valid even for watches not yet created. Therefore, it is a method for incorporating emotions in the product development phase.

In KE, there is an attempt to describe the whole range of emotions a product can convey. We are not modelling a unique response (such as the elements that make people prefer one watch over the others) but several responses (such as the elements that provoke people to perceive a watch as being modern, elegant, reliable and so on). There are as many responses as necessary concepts to cover the whole range of expected emotions.

The method was first proposed by researcher Mitsuo Nagamachi in the 1970s. He had a background in psychology and medicine and was working at that time in Hiroshima University's Faculty of Engineering (Childs et al., 2003). The term kansei engineering was first used in 1986 by Kenichi Yamamoto, then the president of Mazda Motor (Schütte, 2005). Professor Nagamachi soon adopted this term. Since then, KE has been successfully used in several sectors: automotive, apparel, electronic home products and packaging, among others, initially in Japan and Korea. A paper by Mitsuo Nagamachi (1995) published in the journal Applied Ergonomics can be considered as a seminal paper where Professor Nagamachi presents his proposal to the world scientific community.

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