Development of self-effect, important in the formation of career has been investigated in the class of “making things”in a middle school. It has been clearly s hown in the comparison of a group with experience of a lesson of “making things”to a group without the experience that the lesson is highly effective in the progress of self-efficacy in the fields of the accumulation of information, the perspective in the future life and the evaluation of self ability. The relation between the progress of self-efficacy and the career formation has been also discussed.

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Through the investigation of the behavior of pupile s in a class, where they are actualcy “making things”in a middle school, the progress and development in recognition of the relationship between the process of making things and their circumstances including other people and t heir environment has been clarified. As the pupils come close to the goal of making things with their own manu facturing plan, the range of.their recognition of relationship is enlarged from the behavior relating to th eir own interests such as rather meaningless random walks among classmates, and bigins to cover inform ation exch ange with not only classmates but also family members orrelatives and, furthermore, the collaboration with classmates. It has been concl uded that the education in actually“making things”is effective in cultivating the kans ei for “m aking things”because of the development ofrelationship recognition of pupils.

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In order to develop a 3D object-design-system, we intend to construct a Java-based application to serve as Kansei information processing. Designers can customize the system to design the solid primitives, such as ball, cone, cylinder, cube and taper elements, etc., by using their Kansei and then combine the reconfigured solids as an object to reflect the users' desires. In order to mine the Kansei information and construct a Kansei database in the application, Kansei evaluation for ten models of a primitive element cone was measured by the semantic differential method. Fuzzy set theory was applied to investigate the measurement results. The primitive model could be classified among four pairs of adjectives. The amount of the features of classified primitive models was defined as the Kansei evaluation variable. The machine-learning algorithm of an individual adaptation object-design-system was proposed using the Kansei evaluation variable.

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Sitting comfort of three automotive seats (a middle class car, a popular class car, and a mini-sized car), whose cushion angles were changed 0°, 8°or 15° and back angles, surface materials and pad shape were the same, was evaluated by only human tactile sensation while sitting on these seats. As the result of the sensory evaluation, three class seats whose cushion angles were 8° were evaluated the most “high-class”and those seats whose angles were 15° were evaluated the most “sporty”. Further a pressure and a contact area distributions between the human body and the seat were measured by a tactile sensor system while sitting on seats whose cushion angles were 0, 8 or 15°. From the result of correlation analysis among the cushion angle, the pressure distribution and the sensory values of sitting comfort, it is found that the “sporty”and “hold”feeling increases as the cushion angle of the middle class carincreases. The “support under the femoral region”feeling increases as the angle of the popular class car increases. And the “hold”feeling increases and the “comfortable”feeling decreases as the angle of the mini-sized car increases.

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The purpose of this study is to examine the impressionistic evaluation for flowers. By the use of 26 impressionistic adjectives, we conducted a questionnaire survey and a laboratory experiment that evaluate flowers. The survey showing pictures of flowers has produced response from 308 individuals in the late autumn of 2000. The experiment showing alive flowers was conducted to 7 females in the summer of 2001. The Principal Component Analysis analyzed the structure of the evaluation for flowers with 26 adjectives. The analysis revels that, (1) the first principal component is strongly related to the likability of flowers, and it accounts for 35% of the evaluation with the 26 adjectives, (2) the second principal component can be interpreted as sharp-soft, (3) the third principal component can be interpreted as casual-formal.

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Advertising design has to give a consumer an incentive to purchase by giving a visual impact. It is very interesting to examine what kind of image gives an incentive to a consumer. The purpose of this study is to extract the design element which influences kansei strongly. The originals of a food advertisement were used for kansei evaluation experiment. The multivariate analyses which are cluster analyses, factor analyses and quantification type I were used to examine relationships between the design and kansei from obtained data. We mainly made the influence that a kind of product and a design element caused to kansei clear form the examination.

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Facial expression is one of important elements in conveying information in communication. Portraits directly express features of an individual face, and portraits of a person exist as many as the number of painters' brushwork. Most of the previous work on portrait generation with facial expressions and painters' brushwork combines facial-part illustrations. However, the number of facial-part illustrations is limited, which does not exactly express features of each individual face. We propose a portrait-generation system with facial expressions and painters' brushwork. The system can depict features of an individual face by adjusting characteristic points on facial parts. Also, we evaluate the system, based on results of a questionnaire survey.

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The fantastic light of firefly, which keeps fascinating the heart of Japanese from ancient time, and the ecosystem, are taken up as one of cure fields being benefit from the nature. In this study, from the viewpoints of semantic differentials and engineering, we focused on the light of firefly, and we examined whether they cause the human spirit any effects or not. It was possible to find for welfare utilizations that there is the high possibility that a sufficient cure effect exists in the light emission pattern of firefly and the ecosystem. This research is the first basic trial turned to the creation of cure space for hospices and welfare facilities, which utilize the firefly and the mini ecosystem artificially modeled in an enclosure.

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The multimodal anthropomorphic agent interfaces are effective means as a human communication technology. This paper has proposed the simple utterance model of the mouth shape for applying a multimodal anthropomorphic agent to small-scale system environment. We consider that the sequence of the height/width of a mouth shape measured from a Japanese newscaster's mouth movement image video is a signal waveform. The frequency ingredients contained in these waveforms are analyzed by Fourier transform. We have created the simple utterance model that is the typical waveform of the height/width of a mouth shape calculated from only nine or ten frequency ingredients. The validity of our proposed utterance model is verified by the comparison examination for two conventional simple utterance animation models.

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Recently, the landscape in Japan is getting worse. In order to investigate the factor of aggravation, landscape evaluation by the senses is performed. It has a look at a landscape with vision other than the taste, hearing, smell and the tactile sense. The information is united, a subject is taken out and the indicator of scene correction is made.

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As the number of Japanese people who have bleached or penned hair has increased, hair damage caused by chemical treatments has become the subject of much discussion. In response, morphological techniques to analyze hair damage have focused on the hair surface, such as the cuticle condition and hair color. However, little is known about the contribution of inner structure of human hair on this issue. The authors have developed a convenient method of extracting proteins from human hair in the absence of detergent, which is called the ‘Shindai method’. Using this method, we examined lightness/saturation, sensory evaluation, and biochemical analysis of human hair samples after several bleach treatments. We found a significant correlation between sensory evaluation of damaged hair and the extraction velocity of protein from it.

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