In this study, Kansei engineering was used to analyze people's subjective responses to a streetscape plan for a historic townscape. The Chofu area in Shimonoseki city was chosen for the Kansei analysis, and the appearance of the streetscape was evaluated on the basis of actual photographs by using the traditional semantic differential method. A guideline is often formulated to promote a landscaping plan in such historic towns. Generally, a landscape guideline established for a public purpose recognizes the anticipated loss of the worth to landowners and leaseholders resulting from the agreement, even if the plan is not legally binding or does not include penalties. The regulation, therefore, might be neutral in how it affects concerned residents or businesspersons in the area covered by the guideline. The different positions of people in the region, such as residents, tourist agents, or businesspersons, should be reflected in the views of the entire community. When building the plan, it is necessary to unify the concept and the image of the streetscape in the community. However, an issue sometimes comes up in such areas where the criteria for landscaping are not unified in the community. The principal concept of “Image held in the region and image of the individual place of the street” must be unified in advance. The Kansei engineering study proposed in this study revealed the representative design elements arising from the regional characteristics of the area and its people. The pilot investigation using self-organizing maps (SOMs) demonstrated the development of landscape image maps to consider the streetscape elements from observation points in the area. SOM has been used as an alternative analytical method that replaces factor analysis or PCA in recent Kansei engineering studies. This study employed a general SOM approach to illustrate streetscape zoning.

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Some textures and materials are appealing to our sense of touch in daily life. What makes us intuitively feel like touching these particular things? Haptic invitations of such materials have rarely been investigated. The present report identifies the relationships between the visual and sensory properties of textures and their haptic invitations. We used 24 artificial clay textures that were varied along four visual factors, and quantified the degrees of haptic invitations of these textures using a ranking approach. Multiple regression analyses were performed to investigate the relationships between the degrees of haptic invitations of textures and texture factors. The surface glossiness and shape patterns of textures strongly affected the degrees of haptic invitations of those textures, but surface colors had little impact. As to the sensory factors yielded by semantic differential method, the glossless, dry, sticky, and simple factors strongly affected the textures' degrees of haptic invitations. Furthermore, we found that apparent comfort is intimately related to the attractiveness of textures. Visual and sensory factors captured 68% and 75% of the variance in subjective attractiveness, respectively. These results suggest that the visual and sensory factors associated with textures are useful for designing textures that people find attractive. In addition to these general trends of haptic invitations, individual preferences were classified into a few groups. The preferences of majority were affected by glossiness of surfaces whereas there were roughness- and smoothness-sensitive groups.

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Along with increase in affective value of product, “bringing happiness to people” has become product designers' mission nowadays. Starting from viewpoint of emotional design, this study discusses rational and perceptual interactive relationship between human and products through pursuing “eudaimonia” philosophy, and utilizes multiple-perspective analysis to know perceptual connotation and design strategy of product eudaimonia perception. Three issues are explored: (1) The Chinese and western theories about “eudaimonia”. (2) Experts and users' viewpoints of eudaimonia perception of a product. (3) The design communication of eudaimonia perception on products. Research results show that connotations of product eudaimonia perception include three aspects: physiological, psychological and spiritual, and this is in agreement with Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. In addition, the generalized 9 dimensions and 20 design indicators of perceptive connotations also demonstrate key features of product eudaimonia perception design. Aimed at beautifying user's somatic and psychic environment as well as delivering optimistic and positive energy, product eudaimonia perception design hopes to construct happy ethics of product design by establishment of product eudaimonia design mode and make “eudaimonia” spread along with expanding of products.

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We describe the effectiveness of interactive evolutionary computation (IEC) with tournament-style evaluation, aiming to reduce the evaluation load of IEC users. In tournament-style evaluation, users evaluate candidate solutions using a paired comparison. We use three evaluation objects (music, animation, and images) and evaluate the performance of three methods. The first is a normal interactive genetic algorithm (NIGA), which is a conventional 10-stage evaluation. The second is a tournament-style evaluation with two levels (T2), which evaluates only the superiority or inferiority of two candidates. The third is a tournament-style evaluation with four levels (T4), which progressively evaluates the superiority or inferiority of two candidates. We inspect the effectiveness of tournament-style evaluation by numerical simulations using an evaluation agent that imitates human's Kansei and an evaluation experiment with real users. The simulation results and experimental results show that T2 and T4 more effective for reducing evaluation load of IEC users than NIGA.

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Differences in perceptions due to different degrees of sensitivity to the “atmospheres” of situations, or scenes, were investigated using affective evaluation data of a simulated wedding party by 27 adjectives of our previous research. Results indicated that participants with high- and low sensitivity to atmospheres similarly perceived the appearance and situations of the wedding scenes. However, there were differences in the degree of feelings about the atmosphere. The reasons for these differences were investigated using a graphical modeling approach. Results indicated that when participants with high sensitivity to atmospheres perceived the wedding, they experienced feeling about the atmosphere of the scene with diversity and rich associations, as indicated by the adjectives depicting the wedding. By contrast, those with low sensitivity related to the adjectives in a simple manner, for example, the adjectives “bright,” characteristic of the atmosphere of the situation was associated with only “showy,” in adjectives depicting the wedding.

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