Research Into Kansei Engineering And Its Application In Industrial Design

With the rapid development of science and technologies, people's needs for functional products have been fully satisfied with abundant social production, thus while purchasing products, their decisions are increasingly independent on psychological and emotional needs, and attach greater importance to emotional experience and manifestation of individuality brought by. the products; on the other hand, serious challenges are facing manufacturers and designers worldwide: technological superiority is no longer as effective as in the past to win market competition due to modern technology convergence, thus new ways to differentiate their products from competitors' must be explored. Striving to enhance the emotional and psychological satisfaction of products to customers have become the consensus target of designers and manufacturers all over the world.Kansei Engineering, which originates in the 1970s in the Hiroshima University of Japan, just rises against this background. "Kansei Engineering is a technical methodology to translate consumer's Kansei into product design elements" is the most direct interpretation of the technology. The target of this technology is to provide designers and manufacturers with a technique to master the emotional and spiritual needs of consumers and then manifest them in product design to enhance competitive edge. After more than 30 years' co-operation and joint research between experts and enterprises, Kansei Engineering has developed into a complete and systematic design methodology and has been introduced into various industries in Japan, as well as in Europe, America, South Korea, Taiwan of China, and many other countries and districts, and a series of very successful products have been developed with this technique. Thus Kansei Engineering is spreading to all over the world.However, Kansei Engineering is relatively new to entrepreneurs and designers in China Mainland, and technical data and thesis about the technology are rare in Chinese. In light of this situation and on the basis of finishing a lot of English literature reading about this technology, the author conducted systematical study about Kansei Engineering in this thesis with the aim to enhance understanding of it for domestic designers and accelerate spread of it. First of all, the origin, implications, commonly used methods, classifications, application procedures and successful cases of Kansei Engineering are explored in detail; secondly, basing on the study about the situations of China's domestic design industy, the author analyzed several points that China's design industry should learn from Japan and Kansei Engineering technology, and proposed a simplified Kansei Engineering Model which is easier to execute and suitable for domestic design industry; for readers' better understanding about the technique, in the end, the author conducted a study on "Linking Kansei with Design Elements of Electric Kettle" using this simplified model and gives detailed description of the procedures.Through thorough research about this technique, this thesis demonstrates that Kansei Engineering is a very useful design method to master consumers' psychological and emotional needs and translate these needs into product design.