Interview: Chris Angus on Kansei Engineering
Chris Angus and Carolyn van Lottum co–founded Instinctive Choice, an organisation focussing on designing and engineering instantaneous emotional appeal into products and services. A large part of their work is in communicating the need and viability of emotional design.
They have spent several years translating Kansei Engineering for European contexts and are pioneers in developing Kansei based approaches for service design.
UX, user experience, has become quite popular. How does Kansei make user experience a viable, feasible, workable proposition for business?
Chris: The whole purpose of KE (Kansei Engineering) is to develop a product or service that evokes the desirable instantaneous emotional responses and psychological impressions for target groups of users – in that sense it is a tried and tested scientific methodology that can deliver on certain aspects of user experience. It deals directly with the desirability, although it’s most valuable alongside excellent functionality, usability etc. Engineering the desirability of products with poor functionality or usability leads to a kind of emotional mismatch; the initial appeal is strong but the resulting experience is somewhat lacking.
Carolyn: The advantage of the Kansei approach is that it expressly links the product/service appeal and physical aspects of the product or service. The business is provided with a set of firm actions to take based on real data. User experience is considered from the start of the design process, avoiding the need to retro–fit the experience at a later date when both the experience and the customers’ perceptions are harder to change.
Kansei would seem to be an ideal collaboration tool for more marketable products and less frustration for engineering and technologists, is that how you see it?
Carolyn: Yes, Kansei certainly involves a high degree of collaboration between all the business functions, Kansei is a “market–in” rather than “product–out” approach. Voice of the customer marketing information is a vital component of the design process, so it’s not a matter of releasing the product into the market and then seeing where it fits.
Marketing professionals are comfortable dealing with the emotions and aspirations of the customer so it must be frustrating when a gap appears between the ‘desires’ of the customer and the final product. However as an engineer, there are practical aspects to production which can’t be avoided! The advantage of the Kansei approach is that the desires of the customer, the vision of the design team and the practicalities of engineering can all be addressed during the design process. The end product will meet the desires of the customer (even if there have been changes to the original concept) because the elements which make them feel positive about the product have been identified and incorporated. Where compromises are necessary because of practicalities, these will be the best possible, made without losing sight of the original design brief.
Skeptics might contend if you did five runs of any methodology involving emotion and design, you’ll get five different products because emotions are so changeable. What would you tell the skeptic who is exploring Kansei but trying to keep an open mind?
Chris: The emotions (although not strictly emotion in a Psychology sense) involved in KE are about the emotions people would like to experience and not about how they happen to feel on a particular day. The emotion that people want to feel about specific products or services is much less prone to change through time. Some work has been done on the stability of Kansei responses through time although I’m not aware of any consensus of opinion on factors effecting stability. The evidence base exists which confirms emotion as a key driver in decision making; failing to design products which elicit positive emotional responses essentially leaves the key decision driver to chance, a wastefully random approach.
Carolyn: How people perceive individual stimuli doesn’t seem to change rapidly with mood, for example, if someone associates a particular colour with “happy” or a particular animal with “untrustworthy” it is unlikely that they’ll revise that in a short space of time. However, fashions do change so businesses need to understand that there may be a shifting of the Kansei model through time, for example, a colour which is currently viewed as “modern and stylish” may over time be seen as “dated” or may pick up some specific connotation if it is heavily linked with a particular product or brand.
Can you describe how the typical design process would work; at what point in development would Kansei be most effectively used?
Chris: KE is best described in simple terms, as like many Japanese ideas the underlying concept is simple. Find out what customers would like to feel (identify the key Kansei), figure out what is likely to make customers feel that way (identify potential influencing design elements), map one to the other (multivariate statistical modelling) and then choose the combination of elements which elicit the desired responses. In essence that’s it. The methodology needs to be built in right at the start of the design process at the concept stage.
Is Kansei just for industrial design — many products today are part hardware, part software — and what about web sites or service business?
Chris: Essentially any point at which a customer interacts with a product, service or website gives rise to an instantaneous emotional response or psychological feeling i.e. a Kansei. So the concept is applicable, although some translation of the statistics which underpin the approach is needed. That said, our experience is that companies find the concepts harder to grasp in relation to services.
Since many contend emotions drive buying decisions, does the practice of Kansei engineering give a business crucial insight into emerging buying trends they couldn't get otherwise?
Chris: I think if you adopt and embrace a KE approach it can offer rich insight in several areas. Identifying emerging trends is certainly a possibility using a KE based approach. Within an emerging trend there are probably clusters of buyers with similar emotional responses to a given product or service. I’m sure there are tools that are better suited to developing this type of insight – the value of Kansei is in linking the emotional response to specific design features or combinations of features.
Related Articles:
A Desirability Design Process Diagram
Resources
- Surface finish and touch—a case study in a new human factors tribology outlines a typical Kansei approach.
- Product Experience “In contrast to other books, the present book takes a very broad, possibly all-inclusive perspective, on how people experience products. It thereby bridges gaps between several areas within psychology (e.g. perception, cognition, emotion) and links these areas to more applied areas of science, such as product design, human-computer interaction and marketing.”
- Mazda reinvents the Miata explains one of the more famous applications of Kansei engineering.