Usually consumers purchase or select products according to their functional require-ments or psychological needs. In this chapter we concerned ourselves with Kansei evalua-tion focusing on consumers’ psychological needs and feelings according to so-called Kansei attributes, which reflect aesthetic aspects of human perception on products. In particu-lar, a preliminary study is conducted beforehand to obtain Kansei data of products, by means of the semantic differential method and linguistic variables. These Kansei data are then used to generate Kansei profiles for evaluated products by means of the voting statistics. Because consumers’ preferences on Kansei attributes of products vary from person to person and target-oriented decision analysis provides a good description of in-dividual preference, the target-oriented decision analysis is used to quantify how well a product meets consumers’ Kansei preferences. Due to the vagueness and uncertainty of consumers’ preferences, three types of fuzzy targets are defined to represent consumers’
preferences. Because consumers usually may prioritize Kansei attributes, i.e., a prioriti-zation hierarchy of Kansei attributes, a prioritized OWA aggregation operator is utilized to aggregate the partial degrees of satisfaction for the evaluated products.
In the next chapter, we shall conduct a case study to illustrate how the proposed Kansei evaluation model works in practice.
Chapter 8
Case Study: Kansei Evaluation of Japanese Traditional Crafts
Abstract: Most research of Kansei evaluation focuses on the product design. However, Kansei evaluations of existing products have generally received less attention. Kansei evaluations of existing products would be of great help for marketing or recommendation purposes, and particularly in the era of e-commence. As the aesthetic aspects (brand image, pattern, personal aesthetics, current trends of fashion etc.) play a crucial role in consumers’ perceptions of traditional crafts, Kansei information is essential and necessary for this evaluation problem.
The main focus of this chapter is to conduct a case study for Kansei evaluation for Kanazawa gold leaf, one types of Japanese traditional crafts. To do so, a preparative study is conducted first to gather the Kansei assessments of the thirty products of Kanazawa gold leaf. Secondly, the Kansei profiles of the thirty Kanzawa gold leaf were obtained based on the preparative study. Thirdly, based on two types of preferences (Kansei feeling target and prioritization of these targets), we obtained the Kansei evaluation results. From this case study, the consumers can choose their preferred products of Kanazawa gold leaf according to their Kansei preferences.
8.1 Introduction
In an increasing completive world market, it is more and more important for manufac-tures to have a customer-oriented approach to improve the attractiveness in development of new products, which should not only satisfy requirements of physical quality, defined objectively, but should also satisfy consumers’ psychological needs, by essence subjective.
This has actually received much attention since the 1970s from the research community of consumer-oriented design and Kansei engineering. As an essential step in Kansei engi-neering, Kansei evaluation is today well established methodology in product design and commercial available service in Asia. Kansei evaluation has been applied to product design with successful results, e.g., food industry [5], design of mobile phone models [8,68, 90], telephones [59], tactile sense on surface roughness [33], material selection and design of Chair [123], machine tool design [102], design of battery drills [118], car design [104], design of baby stroller [129], design of table glasses [112].
Most research of Kansei evaluation focuses on the product design. However, Kansei evaluation of existing products have generally received less attention. Kansei evaluation of existing products would be of great help for marketing or recommendation purposes, and particularly in the era of e-commence, where recommendation systems have become an important research area. Therefore, Llinares and Page [92] have analyzed consumers’
emotional response to real estate promotions by using Kansei evaluation techniques. And they conducted a case study by using the urban flats in the city of Valencia (Spain).
According to our knowledge, little research of Kansei evaluation for traditional crafts has been addressed yet. As the aesthetic aspect (brand image, pattern, personal aes-thetics, current trends of fashion etc.) plays a crucial role in consumers’ perceptions of traditional crafts, Kansei information is essential and necessary for this evaluation prob-lem. In this chapter, we focus on Kansei evaluation of traditional crafts. In Japan, there are many traditional crafts such as fittings, textile, etc. These beautiful, elegant and deli-cate products are closely related to and have played an important role in Japanese culture and life. Evaluations of these traditional crafts would be of great help for marketing or rec-ommendation purposes. In addition, as consumers’ preferences on the Kansei attributes of traditional crafts vary from people to people, we shall use the proposed Kansei evalua-tion model proposed in Chapter 7 by considering consumers’ preference informaevalua-tion into account.
Based on the above two reasons, the main objectives of this chapter are twofold.
1. To conduct a case study of Kansei evaluation for traditional crafts in Japan, 2. and to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed Kansei evaluation model in
Chapter 7.
The rest of this chapter is organized as follows. Section8.2introduces some background information of traditional crafts in Japan. In Section 8.3 we conduct a preparative study to gather the Kansei assessments of thirty products of Kanazawa gold leaf. In Section8.4 we evaluate the thirty products of Kanazawa gold leaf by means of the Kansei evaluation model proposed in Chapter 7. In Section 8.5 we give some discussions of this case study.
Finally, some concluding remarks are given in Section 8.6.