Kansei engineering (Japanese: 感性工学 kansei kougaku, emotional or affective engineering) aims at the development or improvement of products and services by translating the customer's psychological feelings and needs into the domain of product design (i.e. parameters).
Kansei engineering parametrically links the customer's emotional responses (i.e. physical and psychological) to the properties and characteristics of a product or service.
Customers purchase products based on subjective terms such as brand image, reputation, design, impression etc.. A large number of manufacturers have started to consider such subjective properties and develop their products in a way that conveys the company image.
This demand has triggered the research dealing with the translation of the customer's subjective, hidden needs into concrete products.
This network refers to the new research field as "emotional design" or "affective engineering".
Thanks to this field of research, it is possible to gain knowledge on how to design more attractive products and make the customers satisfied.
Charles E. Osgood developed his semantic differential method in which he quantified the peoples' perceptions of artifacts.
Some years later, in 1960, Professors Shigeru Mizuno and Yoji Akao developed an engineering approach in order to connect peoples' needs to product properties.
Choosing and defining the domain are carried out on existing products, concepts and on design solutions yet unknown.
He posed that every artifact can be described in a certain vector space defined by semantic expressions (words).
Suitable sources are pertinent literature, commercials, manuals, specification list, experts etc.
In a second step the words are grouped using manual (e.g. Affinity diagram)[3] or mathematical methods (e.g. factor and/or cluster analysis).
The research into constructing these links has been a core part of Nagamachi's work with Kansei engineering in the last few years.
Most types require good expert knowledge and a reasonable amount of experience to carry out the studies sufficiently.
In order to facilitate application some software packages have been developed in the recent years, most of them in Japan.
There are two different types of software packages available: User consoles and data collection and analysis tools.
However, such software requires a database that quantifies the connections between Kanseis and the combination of product attributes.
The concept of Kansei Engineering Software (KESo) Linköping University in Sweden.