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.