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ELSEVIER International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics 15 (1995) 3-11
Abstract
Kansei Engineering was developed as a consumer-oriented technology for new product development. It is defined
as "translating technology of a consumer's feeling and image for a product into design elements". Kansei
Engineering (KE) technology is classified into three types, KE Type I, II, and III. KE Type I is a category
classification on the new product toward the design elements. Type II utilizes the current computer technologies
such as Expert System, Neural Network Model and Genetic Algorithm. Type III is a model using a mathematical
structure.
Kansei Engineering has permeated Japanese industries, including automotive, electrical appliance, construction,
clothing and so forth. The successful companies using Kansei Engineering benefited from good sales regarding the
new consumer-oriented products.
Relevance to industry
Kansei Engineering is utilized in the automotive, electrical appliance, construction, clothing and other industries.
This paper provides help to potential product designers in these industries.
Keywords: Consumer-oriented technology; Product development; Kansei of psychological feeling; Expert system;
Database; Computer graphics
(iii) Knowledge-base
Knowledge-base consists of the rules needed
to decide the highly correlated items of the de-
sign details with the Kansei words. Some rules
resulted from the calculation of the Quantifica-
Client Interface tion Theory and some from color conditioning
principles and so forth.
lolal on [ |ffI~
m
woman
2-
- -
Fig. 5. A steering wheel design produced by KES. The picture on the right is for a female, the middle one for a male and the left
one for the combination.
M. Nagamachi/ InternationalJournal of lndustrial Ergonomics 15 (1995) 3-11 7
sei word database and checks whether it can for a college girl costume is called FAIMS (Fash-
recognize them or not. If it can recognize them, ion Image System) and the KES for a house is
the words are transferred to the knowledge-base. called HULLS (Human Living System) (Naga-
The inference engine works in this stage by machi, 1991a).
matching the rule-base and the image database.
Then, the inference engine decides the aspects of (ii) Designer-supporting KES
design details and the controller of KES pulls out Another KES application is for help in design-
and displays the appropriate parts and color on ing a new product. When a designer is creating a
the screen (see Fig. 5). new product, he or she starts with his or her
product image or concept. Then, he or she con-
(vi) How to construct the KES sults with the KES by inputting the designer's
First of all, a KES engineer decides a specific image words. The KES outputs the result of
product domain. If a company wants to make a calculation in Kansei Engineering on the display.
new automotive model and his or her role is If the displayed graphics are different from the
concerned with an interior design, the engineer designer's image, it can be changed in the shape
has to decide whether his or her research is a design and color by the KES change procedure
dashboard design or a steering design and so (see Fig. 4).
forth. The KES engineer collects the Kansei words
and constructs the SD scale of the words. He or 2.3. Type III: Kansei Engineering Modeling
she collects the number of steering designs, 20 to
30 for instance, and asks his or her colleagues to In Kansei Engineering Type III, a mathemati-
estimate them by the SD scales. After analyzing cal model is constructed in spite of the rule-base
the evaluated data by Factor Analysis and the to obtain the ergonomic outcome from Kansei
Quantification Theory Type I, the KES engineer words. In this procedure, a mathematical model
makes the aforementioned four databases, the implies a kind of logic which plays a similar role
inference engine and the control system, based to the rule-base.
on the Expert System procedure. An example of this type is the Sanyo Co.,
which is described in another paper in this special
Application aspects of KES issue. Fukushima and his colleagues in Sanyo
There are two ways of applying the KES. One attempted to apply Kansei Engineering to a color
supports the consumer's decision for a choice of printer (Fukushima et al., 1995). They succeeded
the products, and another supports the designer's in constructing an intelligent color printer which
decision for the product development. allows a change of the original color to be more
beautiful and more preferred face skin color us-
(i) The consumer-supporting KES ing Fuzzy Kansei Logic.
Suppose a consumer wants to buy a costume
or a house. He or she has a Kansei or feeling
concerning his or her desire for the product. For 3. Applications of Kansei engineering
instance, she wants to buy an elegant a n d / o r sexy
costume at some price, and he wants to construct 3.1. Application of Type I
his luxurious house at some price. They sit in
front of a KES computer and input their desired Several years ago, Japanese automotive com-
Kansei words into the KES. It understands their panies attempted to introduce Kansei Engineer-
desire through the inference engine and produces ing in the automotive vehicle design develop-
the final decisions from the computer which ment. Nissan, Mazda and Mitsubishi were eager
matches their desire for the products. The KES is to implement Kansei Engineering and they began
able to help the consumer's decision for a choice to produce many kinds of newly designed passen-
about a product. The consumer-supporting KES ger cars. Nissan has applied the new ergonomic
8 M. Nagamachi / International Journal o f Industrial Ergonomics 15 (1995) 3 - 11
technology to all new brands since the production were collected from a variety of cars and they
of "CIMA". Mazda first introduced Kansei Engi- were pictured to make slides. These slides were
neering for developing "Persona" and later for shown to twenty-seven male students and twenty-
"Miyata", which continues to be a good seller. three female students. Then, the subjects evalu-
Mitsubishi studied Kansei Engineering earlier ated these slides on the SD scales.
than any other automotive companies and tried These fifty-nine steering wheel designs were
to implement it in "Diamante", which has been a also analyzed by the Kansei Engineering proce-
good seller. The other Japanese car makers, Toy- dure. They were classified as to 13 design items
ota and Honda, were also eager to study Kansei such as the number of spokes, pad face type, pad
Engineering Type I and introduced this tech- area and so forth. Each item was again classified
nique to design the products. It is safe to say that to smaller categories such as (2, 3, 4) spokes and
all Japanese car makers are interested in intro- (small, medium, large) pad area, and so forth.
ducing Kansei Engineering in vehicle designing. The evaluated data in the SD scales and the
In the U.S.A., Ford Motor Co., former CEO, D. items/categories design details were calculated
Petersen said in his book (Petersen, 1992) that by the Multivariate Analysis or Quantification
Ford learned Kansei Engineering from Mazda Theory Type I. As a result, we obtained the
and implemented it in designing "Taurus". Fiat statistical relations between the Kansei words and
in Italy and even Porsche in Germany are inter- the design details of the steering wheel. By utiliz-
ested in Kansei Engineering. Kansei Engineering ing these outcomes, we constructed four databases
Type I is used through the world, since it seems and a computer-assisted KES for the steering
easy to introduce in the product development. wheel design (KESW) similar to Fig. 4.
This research aimed at constructing the de-
3.2. Application of Type H signer-supporting KES in an automotive com-
pany. Therefore, the evaluated data by the stu-
The KES, the computer-assisted Kansei Engi- dent as well as by the company designers were
neering is most well known in Japan among the implemented in the databases for supporting the
Kansei Engineering procedures. Kansei Engi- designer's decision.
neering Type II has been applied to costume Suppose a car designer is designing a steering
design for a college girl (Nagamachi et al., 1988), wheel. He wants to design a steering wheel with
house design (Nagamachi et al., 1986), entrance "a safe feeling". Then, he inputs the word "a safe
door design in Tateyama Co. (Kashiwagi et al., feeling" in KESW and gets three graphics as
1992), car interior design in Nissan (Jindo et al., shown in Fig. 5. The graphic on the right side in
1991), office chair design in Itoki Co. (Jindo et the figure shows the first candidate design for a
al., 1995), the color planning system in Sharp Co. female consumer and the central graph is for a
(Nagamachi, 1989b), interior design in a construc- male consumer. The left graphic illustrates a
tion machine in Komatsu Co. (Nakata et al., combined male/female design for the first candi-
1994), and automatic door design in NABCO Co. date design.
Following are two case study examples of the We tested the estimation of the resulted dis-
KES. plays by the experienced designers engaging in
the car design. They evaluated very highly the
(i) Application of KES to a steering wheel design artificial designs of the steering wheel decided by
The Kansei words concerning the steering KESW.
wheel design were collected from the dialogue in Another example of Kansei Engineering Type
car shops and from car magazines. Twenty Kansei II is a unique application to an interpretation of
words were finally selected. The SD scales con- the design language. Sharp Co. asked Nagamachi
sisted of these Kansei words for the evaluation of to make an interpretation system on color be-
the steering wheels. tween the designers and the technical engineers.
Fifty-nine samples of steering wheel design When developing a new product, a designer asks
M. Nagamachi / International Journal of lndustrial Ergonomics 15 (1995) 3-11 9
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