Co-design approaches invite users in the early phases of design process for designing new products or services, which helps collecting users’ Kansei data. As users are not formally trained as designer, tools and techniques have been proposed to help users to be creative in co-design. However, hierarchical structure in design teams has negative impacts on quality of collaboration in co-design. In this paper, as a step for employing co-design approach to collect users’ Kansei values, we developed new tools for idea generation and selection. Anonymity was expected to help the participants to freely express their thought. The tools were assessed in a lab-based experiment with sixteen Japanese subjects. Findings show that anonymity leads to higher both objective and perceived creativity in idea generation and increases critical discussion and participants’ perceived performance in idea selection. These findings have the potential to be used in developing tools for design practice.

So far, bionic design has mainly been applied to support functional solutions. In recent times, subjective aspects in product quality become increasingly important to users, too. Under the aspect of targeting a sustainable value creation for users, bionic design may also help to better address users’ subjective needs in product design. Therefore, a new methodology is presented. Its first step is the numeric and perception-related investigation of main geometrical criteria in object shape changes between technical solutions and their bionic models. The second step is the identification and utilization of impressions analogies between the two domains. Thus subjective similarities between the product and its bionic model are examined both in geometrical and in impressions respect in order to derive implications for the field of Emotional Bionics. The methodology is explained in detail by applying a pilot study.

In the industrial context of concept and product development we face an inevitable increase of globalized scenarios. We constantly partake in exchanges involving diverse cultural backgrounds. Therefore it becomes an essential point, particularly during the early design process, to achieve an optimal transmission of design information through the implementation of accurate cultural layers. However, problems may arise if there is not an adequate level of cultural understanding. We want to address the importance of cross-cultural tools in the communication of design information in early-phases. We introduce two study cases to open up the discussion on the subject. Both cases correspond to research projects conducted at the Kansei Design division at Toyota Motor Europe (KD-TME). These projects generated specific tools as an output for strategists and designers to aid in the production of inspirational material or define a target user, with a more grounded and sensible cultural base.

We present an Interactive Evolutionary Computation (IEC) system that applies user gaze information. Historically, IEC systems have encountered the problems caused by heavy user evaluation loads. To solve these problems, researchers have employed biologically derived user information, such as heartbeats or brainwaves, to reduce the evaluation load. However, the requirement for users to wear special devices to measure this information has limited the popularity of these systems. Therefore, we applied the user gaze information approach to solve these problems. Gaze information includes the user’s potential preferences, which are derived from various processes. When user gaze information is applied in the evaluation of candidate solutions, IEC systems can obtain user evaluation information while users are viewing multiple candidate solutions. In this paper, we verify the effectiveness of the eye tracking IEC system using evaluation experiments with real users. In the experiment, we use a normal IEC system as a comparison method where users manually evaluate candidate solutions using a 10-stage evaluation process. The experimental results show that the eye tracking IEC method can generate solutions with results equivalent to those of the compared system.

To make users feel a specific impression, a number of studies have provided a way to estimate product impressions with physical features. Although the methodologies of these studies are useful in a wide range of areas, they require a large number of evaluation experiments to reveal the relation between them, and their costs are very high. To solve them, we proposed a method to score each product on the important impression of its domains. This consists of categorizing evaluation terms into internalized and externalized evaluation by using the appraisal dictionary, discovering the important impressions by using only externalized evaluations, and conclusively scoring these product impressions numerically from the term-score and affinity of words. The result of the verification experiment indicated that the obtained scores are valid in terms of their correlations with people’s evaluation.

Co-designing with children is a recent challenge to the development of new products. Children and designers can express ideas through rough drawings, also called “sketches”, but, while drawings are common activities, children can also display lack of confidence or engagement during this task. To motivate children before creating sketches, we considered the administration of group games. This paper tested the effects of different group games on participants’ impressions and outcomes in subsequent design sketch tasks. Two studies were performed. In study 1, higher game difficulty was associated with negative impressions and less detailed drawings. By controlling difficulty, in study 2 we found that games positively affected children’s confidence with their sketches, which indicated to affect design submissions. Results indicated an immediate effect of games on children’s design sketch impressions and outcomes. If negative associations are properly controlled, games can be viable motivators for co-design tasks with children.

This paper aims to use the Kansei Engineering Methodology to study the Thermal Comfort affection in a classroom at the University of Brasilia (Brazil) and propose some changes on an air-conditioner model in order to obtain a better affective relation with users. In the investigation, an air-conditioner was installed on-site to evaluate Kansei responses from 53 people in a classroom. The study determined three main emotions that must be worked on in order to turn it more stimulating: calmness, sleepiness and laziness. The study shows that students who were positioned farther away from the comfort of air-conditioning reported a better sense of relaxation; and air currents at higher intensity are unwanted by most respondents. Based on the senses: visual, auditory, and olfactory, changes were proposed for a new air conditioner, which are: (i) LED light installation; (ii) sound output installation with emission of specific noises; (iii) and scent spray installation.

Following the previous phase of the study, we analyzed diversity of color selections, and gathered free comments of participants to explain the reason why they chose certain colors when presented with different dining situations. Furthermore, a new, simpler version of dining situation sketches was created to compare the emotions between simple and detailed dining situation sketches. We re-analyzed the comparison of emotions based on the key emotion adjective words from free comments. Based on the results, we proposed a model of Kansei process of color selection in dining situations, considering explanation thinking structure and diversity of selections. The results indicated a tendency that in explanation thinking structures, Impression dominant situations led to distributed choices, whereas Attitude dominant situations led to polarized choices. Specific visual elements in dining situation sketches are correlated with emotions, suggesting the potential effect of visual presentations of dining situations on tableware color selections.