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The purpose of this paper is to present and discuss Kansei engineering (KE), which uses a unique ergonomic technology to produce a new product which fits to consumers' feelings and demands. It is a consumer‐oriented product development method based on the consumer mind. It has been applied to realize several new Kansei products so far.

KE is sometimes able to create an invention, but mostly it is powerful to create more comfortable and affective products or services to the customers. KE utilizes psychological methods to grasp the customer's feelings, and the data obtained by this method are analyzed using multivariate statistical analyses which are transferred to the design domain (design specifications).

It was found that a customer has a hierarchy of values of his/her life. All people, from children to the elderly, want to enhance their quality of life. Having qualified products and services, including service men's smiles and greetings is an important factor.

KE is spreading out in the world at present. The paper (witten by the pioneer and founder of KE) tells “a story” about the methods and procedures to create a new Kansei product and refers to the implications of Kansei/affective engineering.

The purpose of the paper is to present and discuss the Kansei engineering (KE) methodology, and to reflect on the future development of KE. The paper presents a model of the KE methodology and illustrates how this model was applied on a simple example which all may understand – design of a new chocolate bar.

The research methodology is a combination of desk research (literature analysis), data collection, data analysis, reflections and model building.

The paper suggests a structural model as a possible expanded framework for future Kansei/affective engineering research studies. According to the model profound affection is a result of the following six enabler factors: sensing experience; emotional experiences (Kansei); behavioural experiences/action; social experiences/interactions and relations; spiritual experiences/moral, ethics; intellectual experiences/cognition.

The paper defines “Profound affection” as a very comprehensive state, which is a result of a combination of sensing, intellectual/cognitive, emotional, social, behavioural and spiritual experiences. “Profound affection” is not only a result of sensing or emotional experiences.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the Kansei engineering toolkit that has been developed to provide a set of tools and techniques to support better packaging design.

The toolkit has its foundations in Kansei engineering but the work has extended the scope and increased reliability of results by: including structured linkages to designers; replacing “highest level Kansei” from Kansei type 1 with brand values; introducing a more structured process for the elicitation of type 2 selection of pack physical properties; reducing the complexity of the semantic differential survey used to elicit consumer perceptions; and structuring a process for selection of the Kansei words.

The work has shown that the proposed toolkit is able to support the design of packaging by illustrating the process with industrial case studies.

Kansei engineering and the techniques presented in this toolkit are inevitably simplifications of the real situation, since many more variables affect the consumers purchase decision than is tested in this process. There is still a need to test the insights gained by the toolkit into a wider investigation.

This paper offers the packaging industry a robust and repeatable method to develop better packaging.

The paper presents an overall description of the Kansei engineering toolkit for packaging design and is a structured process that provides quantitative results for the relationship between branding, consumer perception and design variables.

To obtain a competitive advantage in the logistics market, international express companies should design services to stimulate customers’ usage intention by understanding customers’ affective perceptions (or in Japanese, Kansei) of the service offerings. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the relationships among the service elements of international express, customer Kansei perceptions, and intentions to use the service, to provide new ideas for the design of international express services (IESs).

By using Kansei engineering approach, customers’ Kansei perceptions related to elements of IES are first determined, and the logistic regression technique is then used to analyze three constructed models based on the relationships among the service elements of international express, customers’ Kansei perceptions, and usage intention.

Accordingly, five critical service elements that correspond to four vital Kansei words related to usage intention were obtained based on cross-comparisons of the results of three models. The findings have important implications for international express managers, in that the priorities in designing services should be those service elements that favorably elicit certain Kansei perceptions among customers and effectively lead to customers’ usage intention in the pre-purchase phase. Moreover, some important missing Kansei perceptions further derived from customers’ real service experiences in the post-purchase stage should be incorporated into future design considerations.

This study incorporated customers’ Kansei perceptions into the procedure of IES design. By understanding the service elements and feelings that customers deem important, international express companies can improve the content of existing services and strengthen the design of new services to increase customers’ behavioral intentions.

Today clothing has become the largest category in online shopping in China, and even in Asia-Pacific. The satisfaction degree of apparel online shopping can be improved by effective personalized recommendation. The purpose of this paper is to propose a personalized recommendation model and algorithm based on Kansei engineering, traditional filtering algorithm and the knowledge relating to apparel.

Users’ perceptual image and the design elements of apparel based on Kansei engineering are discussed to build the mapping relation between the design elements and user ratings employing verbal protocol, semantic differential and partial least squares. The implicit knowledge and emotional needs pertaining to users are accessed using analytic hierarchy process. A personalized recommendation model for apparel online shopping is established and the algorithm for the personalized recommendation process is proposed. To present the personalized recommendation model, men’s plaid shirts are taken as the example, and the recommendations of apparel for online shopping were implemented and ranked in the context of differing users’ emotional needs. A comparison between the traditional model and this model is made to verify the effectiveness.

The recommendation model is capable of analyzing data and information effectively, and providing fast, personalized apparel recommendation services in accordance with users’ emotional needs. The experimental results suggest that the model is effective.

Similar researches of recommendation mainly focus on the field of computer science, the basic idea of which is using users’ history accessing records or the preferences of other similar users for determination of users’ preferences. Since the attributes of apparel products are not factored in the approach referred above, the issue of personalized recommendation cannot be solved in a really effective way. Combining Kansei engineering and recommendation algorithm, a framework for apparel product recommendation is presented and it is a new way for improvement of recommendations for apparel products on shopping sites.

Gift flowers should be chosen to depict a message with the sender's kansei and are bound by nature of flowers and social manners, to maintain social relationship between the sender and the recipient. Few buyers, but most florists, have expert knowledge of the flowering time, scent, price, and nature of each flower, and are experts in arranging flowers that meet a given purpose. The purpose of this paper is to incorporate handling constraints into the inference process of a kansei engineering system.

The paper collected the expert knowledge concerning nature of flowers, composing flower arrangements and social manners on gifts from specialists of flower arrangements including a florist and special books. At the same time, kansei evaluation experiments on the kinds of flowers and colors were conducted. The expertise and the results of kansei experiments were organized into a flower database and inference rules for choice of a main flower, arrangement shapes and combination flowers. The rules were implemented as server‐side programs. Users input information about the recipient, purpose of the arrangement and purchase information using a web browser. The system outputs a solution; a list of main flowers, combination flowers, greens and the shape of arrangement.

Traditional kansei engineering studies revealed the relationships between design elements and kansei with developing new analyzing methods. Different constraints come into the actual product design and manufacturing should be integrated with findings obtained from the kansei evaluation to successfully utilize kansei engineering for product development.

The inference rules will be able to tell the reasons for choosing the main‐ and combination flowers and arrangement shapes to satisfy the customers.

The proposed system suggests the original arrangement of flowers unlike most online florists selling ready‐made arrangements. The paper shows a solution to incorporate different constraints underlying in a real production process into the inference process based on the result of kansei analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how logo design characteristics influence consumer response based on visual representation. Logos in different areas may have different characteristics that impact liking a logo. The logos of youth education brands were explored in this study.

The Kansei engineering (KE) method was employed in this research. In total, 115 logos of youth education brands were collected and classified into three categories: abstract, natural and text mark. Then 12 of these logos were selected as representative samples. A set of 171 Kansei pairwise image words was collected, and 14 of them were chosen for further investigation. The psychological projection experiment was conducted based on a five-point Likert-scale questionnaire with 120 participants. Three statistical methods including cluster analysis, factor analysis and correlation analysis were combined for the data analysis.

The results show that four factors affect liking a logo including a sense of contemporaneity, a sense of esthetics, a feeling of interest and a sense of style. Accordingly, the weights of these four factors are proposed. The positive correlation between logo characteristics and liking a logo was also verified. In addition, the classification results of this study confirm the wide use of natural and English text mark logos in youth education brands.

The results could guide designers and managers in selecting or modifying logo design for achieving a positive effective response. This is the first research on logo design characteristics linked with industry domains. This study also contributes to the KE approach to investigate the relative impact of logo characteristics on liking a logo.

It is desirable that shape appeal in craft design takes people's cultural and emotional influencers into consideration. Five Royal Lords worship, prevalent in the southwest coastal part of Taiwan and a source of religious and spiritual support to the local residents, offers such a shape appeal. This study takes the design of Taiwan's cultural handicrafts as the main point of discussion and uses Kansei engineering with semantic technique to promote the linkage between shape and the mental image of the Five Royal Lords' headwear. There are only two types of traditional headwear for the Five Royal Lords: the Imperial Crown and Lord Crown, despite the different personal characteristics of the five deities. This study aims to design a crown for each that matches their individuality.

In the first stage of the research process, the Kawakita Jiro method was used to arrive at appropriate descriptions representative of the deities' individuality. Fuzzy set theory was then applied to convert the relationship between the representative descriptions and headwear shape features into a quantitative one, after which the headwear could be redesigned and validated.

The study results show that: (1) analysis of the relationship between shape features and representative deity descriptions offered guidance to the redesign. (2) A method combining fuzzy theory and description terms could generate quantitative data that helped to provide design suggestions and result validation, supporting both scientific rationality and designers' sensibility. (3) The validation revealed that the redesigned headwear was better than the original headwear.

The study successfully established a design and development process featuring collaboration by folklore experts, designers, craftspeople and worshippers, and helping to promote new cultural product development. The success of the research process can serve as a reference to the development of other different products with shape features.