What are Kansei?
Kansei are the instantaneous feelings and emotions that we experience when we interact with things, such as products and services. By the time we become consciously aware of what we like, our unconscious has already decided using the sensory information received. The conscious mind then pieces together a "logical" story to justify the decision.
Feelings about a particular product could be anything from lust to mistrust, elation to apathy - there is no right or wrong and whatever we feel about a particular product is exactly right for us as individuals. Kansei occur naturally in all things; products and services evoke feelings of some form whether those feelings are strong, weak, desirable or undesirable.
How do you feel about this coffee machine? Do you get a sense of whether it is reliable? Do you get a sense of whether it is modern? Without looking at build quality, reading specifications or customer reviews etc. we do get some sense of what the product is like.
And how do you feel about the coffee machine below? Do you get a sense that it's more reliable or more modern than the one above?
There is no right or wrong answer: it's very much down to you as an individual, your past experiences and what appeals to you on an emotional level.
If you're thinking "reliable" and "modern" aren't really emotions, you are right. Kansei defies a simple one-word translation into English. It can cover a diverse range of feelings and impressions, for example a sense of "joy", "happiness", "elation" through to a sense of "casual", "good deal", "trustworthy".
What is Kansei Engineering?
Kansei Engineering is simply a methodology for ensuring your product or service evokes desirable emotional responses. The process allows you to model customer’s instantaneous feelings and emotions and subsequently translate them into design parameters.
Further details are given in this short overview on the use of Kansei Engineering for products and services.
Why Choose Kansei Engineering?
Designing and developing new products and services is a difficult business, with many more failures than successes. Kansei Engineering greatly reduces the risks inherent in new product and service development. As well as ensuring products and services are developed with "built-in" emotional appeal the approach also reduces time to market, provides breakthrough market share capture and increases product and service lifespan.
Approximately 80% of all new products and services fail within the first six months or fall significantly short of forecasted profits.
Peter Drucker, 2001