We have developed a tablet application to support peer review learning for visual art education. The tablet-based front-end allows students to review others' work and provide comments in the form of written text and also comments drawn directly on the artwork (i.e., the direct comment). We hypothesize that (1) peer review would facilitate learning various techniques for visual art, and (2) students would find it useful to directly provide comment on other's artwork. To test these hypotheses, we conducted three classroom (in-vivo) studies over three years. The goal of this paper is to introduce the tablet-based peer review system and report results from the three in-vivo studies. The results show that (a) the table-based peer review system is as effective as the traditional classroom instruction, and (b) students tend to have a high expectation for the direct comment.

View full abstract

Walking is one of the most essential activities, but there are few studies to investigate walking motion in daily life. Since clothes generally restrain human motion, it is hypothesized that wearing clothes affects walking motion. In this study, we investigated the influence of consciousness when wearing clothes on walking motion. We focused on bottoms, especially, a skinny pants and a flared skirt, and examined difference of walking motion between two bottoms by using an acceleration sensor. It was observed that Lissajous figures of walking motion when wearing the flared skirt were smaller than those of the skinny pants because it is assumed that the flared skirt has “gentle” or “feminine” impression and the skinny pants has “active” impression. From the results of our study, it is considered that consciousness when wearing clothes influences on walking motion.

View full abstract

Feasibility for opening new store retailer, B, is discussed based on the data of already existing store retailer A. For the business status of A and B stores, we assumed the retail of food and beverages. When manager of A store plans to open new store B, the decision of opening B store is regarded as call option. Here, we simulated the net present value, NPV, for future cash flows of A and B stores based on the real past data already existing A store by Monte Carlo simulation. The daily cash flows of A store shows complex changes repeating increases and decreases. However, the fixed tendency is observed by taking averages of the data during constant period. As for the B store, the same tendency can be applied to the simulation of future cash flows of B store. Differences between A and B stores are location conditions, i.e. the amount of passerby, local community in the vicinity of the store and the amount of parking places. Considering these factors, future cash flows of A and B stores are simulated. Taking into consideration of the cash flows of A stores mainly, the withdrawal of A store (withdrawal option) is decided if the cash flows of A store largely decreases. However, the cash flows of A store increases, the open of new store B (expansion option) is decided. NPV values of cash flows of A+B stores are evaluated under the condition where the withdrawal and expansion options are executed according to the change of cash flows of A store.

View full abstract

Business is affected by uncontrollable factors. We call them as outer factors. Outer factors are external conditions and concepts based on our predictions. Community is one of such external conditions. Business manager couldn't control community, but plans to affect it by using advertisement, internet media and so on. By such business behavior, business manager expects good effects to his business. The study aims to elucidate outlines of community from the selling data of a store developing business in the community.

View full abstract

Supposing to start new restaurant, Y, estimation of selling data of it was carried out by using the data of existing similar restaurant, X. The scenario of estimation is as follows. Project implementing body, A, have no experience to manage restaurant. Hence, A have to estimate the selling data of Y which A is going to start in near future. Therefore, A tries to estimate the selling data of Y by comparing with the existing restaurant X which is already managed by other project implementing body, B. Further, we tried to elucidate characteristics of restaurant business in comparison with other type of business, i.e. fashion apparel and mode business. In restaurant business, number of customers are restricted by the number of chairs and tables. However, fashion business doesn't have such a restriction, further number of items is huge.

View full abstract

In Japan, There are most amount of vending machines in the world. Among these, beverage vending machines accounted for 51%. Its revenue is about 2.2 trillion yen. In this way beverage vending machine business has a large market scale. But In recent years, vending machine installed base has slowed. Its sales have declined. Improvement of management is desired. We are analyzing of the work of route man who operates and maintain vending machines. In this paper, we show the results of the recording of his works and analyses. As a results, we can categorize into 12 kinds of vending machines works, and 9 kinds works in depot. All of these sequence seems to be possible supported by information system.

View full abstract

We evaluated the psychophysiological stress of schoolteachers involved in “emotional labor” by assessing their immune substances and hormones in their saliva. Saliva collection was chosen because it is a noninvasive and nonstressful method. Participants were 28 male schoolteachers engaged at a primary and secondary school; no participant was under any prescription drugs. Salivary cortisol (COR), testosterone (TE), and secretory Immunoglobulin A (IgA) were assessed as biomarkers once between 3-7 pm. After saliva collection, participants were asked to complete a questionnaire. No correlation between COR and psychological stress was found. However, TE was positively correlated with the “depressive tendency” factors on the General Health Questionnaire 28 (r = 0.39, p < 0.05) and negatively correlated with “social support” on the Social Support Questionnaire 6 (r = -0.42, p < 0.05). Therefore, TE is suggested to be a promising biomarker for evaluating psychophysiological stress induced by emotional labor.

View full abstract

The purpose of this study is to analyze the influential factors on a diabetic patients' communication through the prototype developed to construct a social support system among diabetic patients who use ICT. The authors conducted semi-structured interviews with 31 patients who had used the system for one year. The results showed that forming relationships through their exchanging of posted messages affected their communication. Furthermore, it became a place to obtain information about self-management that one could not acquire by himself/herself. On the other hand, not being able to know the other users' conditions, the difficulty of joining in others' dialogues, the hesitance of sending information and the hassles of describing their thoughts using ICT also affected the network communication. It is necessary to build a communication that corresponds with diabetic patients' interests and to examine methods that will help support interactive communication.

View full abstract

In this paper, we propose a moral judgment system using distributed representation and associative information. Moral judgment means right and wrong judgment. There are two features in the proposed system. The first one is the usage of distributed representation of sentences. It enables consideration of the meaning of the complicated sentences. Here, the distributed representations adjusted for moral judgment are used to increase the accuracy. The second one is the usage of associative information to consider the related knowledge. In the proposed system, a database of predicate argument structure is constructed by a large corpus (British National Corpus) and is used for association. In the experiments, we compared the proposed system with the judgments by human. We confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed system.

View full abstract

We propose a system to create designs that reflect multiple user preferences. When creating such designs, it is important to collect a significant number of user opinions and adopt them in the designs. However, as the number of users increases, the collection of opinions becomes more difficult. Therefore we propose a system using the paired comparison voting (PCV) method and digital signage. The PCV method obtains preferences from multiple users by voting. The proposed system presents designs for users using digital signage. Thus, the proposed system creates designs that please multiple users. Here, we experiment using the proposed system and demonstrate its effectiveness with real users. The experimental results show that the created designs became similar visually and genetically. As a result, we verified that the proposed system creates designs reflecting the preferences of multiple people.

View full abstract

In recent years, coaching has been utilized in various fields. Much practical research on coaching has employed observable indicators, such as scores in sports, to demonstrate coaching effectiveness. However, career coaching does not have such observable indicators. The authors consider the client's generation of internal values to be an important factor in career coaching. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to analyze unobservable internal value creation in the career coaching process, and to clearly assess coaching effectiveness in this light. The results revealed two types of coaching pattern which elicited client value judgments: one which enhanced existing client values, and one which provided new variables. In addition, we found that the career coaching process had two phases, in which understanding and then consent are enhanced. The study suggested the importance of the coaching process in general, and of the generation of internal values therein.

View full abstract

The objective of the present work is to fabricate Urushi-like glass fiber reinforced plastic (GFRP) by using black silk fabric. We first manufactured a GFRP molded plate consisting of various laminate layers, and compared the surface color with that of Urushi products. Subsequently, we used impression evaluation to reveal how the GFRP plate fabricated using the black silk fabric was rated. The study results confirmed that L* and a* values of the GFRP sample were similar to those of the Urushi sample. In the impression evaluation, almost half of the subjects considered the GFRP sample fabricated using the black silk fabric (with lightness similar to that of the Urushi product) as the original Urushi product. The subjects also associated more “beauty,” “sense of luxury and high quality,” and “depth of blackness” with the sample regarded as the Urushi product than with the sample not regarded as the Urushi product.

View full abstract

The purpose of this study is to provide a measurement of user's thought process after discussing the experiment with “degree of formed mental model”, which involves a logical thinking. This paper suggests a method for mental model measurement by using kappa coefficient. We studied 107 participants based on questionnaire to measure mental models. The study showed the usability test to be more efficient because users completed it in less time than they needed to complete the questionnaire. Our results showed that users have illogical thinking when making a guess based on their mental model. This method helped understanding the potential effectiveness of mental model measurement. The obtained results indicate that despite their simplicity, these methods give relatively accurate results and are sufficient for the design process. This method contributes to the improvement of the usability of interface.

View full abstract

My subject is to analyze the characteristics of the Fashion Engineering in Chinese SPA company through the case study about the decision making process of the Chief Design Officer. The meaning of fashion designers is to segment the customer group set of its designer. Then, designer images the styling, fabric and item design of the customer set. Designer' job is to make decision of the design process. Through the case study of the Cocoon's Chief Designer Officer I could understand not only the leadership of the holistic branding decision making about the styling, fabric and item design but also the assortment and profit of the brand.

View full abstract

This paper presents to extract examinees' feature quantities for a portrait when they draw it using an eye tracking system. We acquired the gaze coordinates of 40 healthy examinees' both eyes by non-restraint and noncontact measurement using infrared rays while they draw a portrait for 390 to 450 seconds. Eight art teachers in high school or university decided each 10 pictures of the high and low reputation value from their evaluation questionnaires. The results of analyzing the frequency of the glance translation a minute between the drawing canvas and the portrait model, the high reputation value group's frequency increased more than the low group's one. Moreover, the drawing glance rate (Ratio of the useful glance movement and the useless glance movement) proposed by the authors became a comparable results too. We succeeded in extracting the feature quantities to draw a portrait well as the numerical value, such as observing the model carefully and concentrating to write a portrait.

View full abstract

Mindfulness-based meditation is one of the most widely used techniques among many different meditation techniques. In this study, we examined the effect of mindfulness meditation on the performance of a task that requires control of timing. The participants performed a timing task after exercises of mindfulness meditation or silent reading. We analyzed accuracy (degree of closeness of measurements to the true value) and precision (standard deviation of measurements). The results showed that mindfulness meditation exercises increased timing precision of the performance, but did not influence accuracy of it. These findings suggest that mindfulness meditation stabilize the timing of human behavioral rhythms.

View full abstract

We investigated whether individual differences in the elaboration of mental models influence users evaluations of appliances based on on-screen information, such as web pages. That is, we examined the extent to which users consider usability or aesthetics when they select appliances. To that end, we asked users who exhibited individual differences in their mental models to compare images of six different versions of five types of product (rice cookers, coffeemakers, cameras, telephones, and scissors). Results showed that users who relied heavily on elaborations regarding product usability, such as “the assembly operation seems to be simple” or “the mode change appears simple,” scored high on mental models. We conclude that users selecting appliances by appearance alone were able to evaluate products based on usability when they had highly elaborated mental models.

View full abstract

In the present study, the subjective evaluation experiment for abstract 3D shapes was conducted as the first step of construction of a system that allows non-design-professional users to design 3D shapes via subjective evaluation words intuitively. In particular, the structure of the subjective evaluation for 3D shapes and the reliability of the evaluation by non-design-professionals were examined. The results showed three-factor solution in which “Uniformity,” “Activity” and “Potency” factors were important evaluative standards in the subjective evaluation for 3D shapes. These factors are similar to Osgood's three factors, which were frequently reported factors in previous semantic differential studies. Furthermore, the subjective evaluations by non-design-professionals were generally consistent, which means that, with respect to the subjective evaluation, non-design-professionals without high level of design skills can evaluate 3D shapes in a reliable way.

View full abstract