Kansei Engineering Applied to Design

The Japanese business and design communities pushed the ‘Kansei Value Creation Initiative,’ led by the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI). It aimed to foster a broader knowledge of the emotional aspects that draw people to things rather than depending on the more traditional factors of reliability, performance, usefulness, and pricing, emphasising emotional fulfilment over monetary fulfilment.

Consumers’ personal hidden requirements and aspirations were integral to the design process in this quasi-psychological link between maker and end-user. Kansei had a distinctively Japanese perspective on product development and was associated with the concept of monozukuri, which is difficult to define in English but can be defined as “craftsmanship” or “creating with skill and artistry.”

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a similar emphasis on the relationship between created items and emotion was also investigated in other parts of East Asia and Europe and the United States. The Kansei-Japan Design Exhibition in Paris (2008), produced by METI and the Japan Export Trade Foundation in collaboration with the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, further promoted Japanese Kansei thought. The following year, at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF, the world’s largest furniture fair of its kind) in New York, a similar initiative was launched, with Kansei values featured as a critical theme of an exhibition titled ‘Japan by Design,’ which was complemented by the Japan Pavilion. Two more shows, dubbed the ‘Kansei Design Experience,’ were held in Kanazawa and Hong Kong in 2010.

Kansei and the Five Senses

“Kansei” refers to the five basic senses—sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste—and how they interact with personal values, ethics, and emotions. It encompasses the meanings of such words as sensitivity, sense, sensibility, feeling, aesthetics, emotion, and affection. It aims to seek the structure of emotions that exist beneath human behaviours. This structure is referred to as a person’s Kansei.

Alternative terms might be total sensitivity or receptiveness, although its whole meaning in Japanese goes much further. It is what is felt when all the senses are in harmony. “Thoughtful awareness” and “heightened sensitivity” are the expressions that come closest to defining Kansei. Perhaps the realisation that the appropriateness of each element on the page underlies the goodness of the whole, that anyone who uses the site can feel the synergy between the user and the site.

Developed by Mitsuo Nagamachi

Kansei Engineering was developed mainly through the work of Mitsuo Nagamachi at the University of Hiroshima. Nagamachi said that it helped investigators understand the relationship between a product’s formal and experiential properties.

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