MAC or PC? Kindle or Sony ereader? Droid, iPhone, or BlackBerry? Customers often find it hard to distinguish between products due to functional equivalency. They will, therefore, base their decisions on subjective factors. A powerful consumer oriented technology for product development, Kansei or Affective engineering translates customer's feelings into concrete product parameters. Developed in the early 70s in Japan, and now popular among Japanese companies, the method spread to the US in the middle of the 90s. However, cultural differences may have prevented the method to enfold its whole potential.
Written by, Mitsuo Nagamachi, the founder of the technology, this two-volume set, Kansei Engineering, provides the background and history of Kansei Engineering and demonstrates how to use it in each stage. It describes how to survey consumer feeling by psychological and or psycho-physiological measurement; and then, the survey data are analyzed using statistical techniques; finally, the analyzed data are transferred to design domain through engineering and technology.
About the Author: The founder of Kansei Engineering, Dr. Mitsuo Nagamachi, Professor Emeritus at Hiroshima University, Japan and the President of the International Kansei Design Institute, has created more than forty new kansei products from cars, construction machines, home appliances, cosmetics, and bridges. He graduated from Psychology Department, Hiroshima University and obtained Ph.D. in the field of Mathematical Psychology in 1963. In 1970's he started the research of Kansei Engineering and has made MX 5 of Mazda, Liquid Crystal Viewcam of Sharp, Good-Up Bra of Wacoal and other products from the viewpoint of customer-orientation. He consults on Kansei Engineering worldwide and was a Japan Government Prize in 2008 for the foundation of Kansei Engineering and many academic awards from Japan Society of Kansei Engineering. He has published 89 books and 200 articles so far.
Dr. Anitawati Mohd Lokman received her Bachelor of Engineering from a Fukui University, Japan. Her working experience involves industrial attachment in NEC C&C Japan, and 7 years service with Toshiba Electronics manufacturing. She has extensive experience in computer systems and technologies including web systems, and is currently a senior lecturer in systems sciences in Universiti Teknologi MARA Malaysia. She had done her PhD work in the field of Human Computer Interaction with the implementation of Kansei Engineering, under the direct supervision of the founder of Kansei Enigneering, Professor Mitsuo Nagamachi.
