Kansei Engineering: Incorporating affection and emotion into the design process

“Kansei is a japanese term where the syllable kan means sensitivity and sei means sensibility. It is used to express the quality of an object for producing pleasure through its use. Therefore, there are objects with much kansei, and others with little or no kansei at all… Professor Mitsuo Nagamachi developed, back in the seventies, a technique to incorporate these issues in the industrial design methodology. This technique, named Kansei Engineering, has already been put into practice by several companies quite succesfully.”