Photographs and CG images are generally rendered using perspective projection. However, we sometimes feel incompatibility when we see these images. This is because the perspective projection image does not always represent the visual impression of real space. We believe that clarifying human visual characteristics will enable us to create more realistic images. A previous study investigated the human perception of size in real space and proposed a magnification-rate function that shows the relationship between the subjective visual size of the object to be drawn and the observation distance. The images that applied the magnification-rate function were closer to the impression in real space than the perspective projection images. However, these results were verified only for single-point perspective landscapes. In this study, we applied the magnification-rate function to images portraying a two-point perspective landscape to investigate the impression of the images. Results show that the magnification transformed images were evaluated to be closer to the impressions in the real space than the perspective projected images. This is similar to the evaluation of the transformed images for one-point perspective landscapes, suggesting that image transformation using the magnification-rate function is effective for two-point perspective landscapes.

Previous study indicated that the simplicity of a visualized situation could play an important role in comprehension and emotion. However, the effect of the art style was never discussed. As an art style with minimalist aesthetic, pixel art’s popularity and value are not well explained. This study is aimed to investigate the difference between pixel and vector art style by comparing one of the visualized situations extracted from previous study and the pixelated counterpart.

166 valid responses were collected (69 males & 97 females). Participants were randomly separated into 2 groups, presented with 2 different art styles. After observing the visualized situation, they filled in a questionnaire asking about their understandings, evoked emotions, how realistic it feels, and how easy for them to picture themselves in the situation. ANOVAs and multiple regression analyses were conducted and results showed that art style did not have a big impact on emotions, whereas for pixel art style, the older the participant is, the easier they could picture themselves being in the situation. Additional analysis using chi-square test found that people tend to believe the situation is in a past era when observing the pixel version. This study revealed the potential impact of pixel art style on people’s comprehension, tricking people to believe it is happening in a past era. This phenomenon should be taken advantage of in not only game design but also other media graphic design scenarios.

Applications operated on smartphones and other devices with a small user interface area on the screen and a large number of functions and contents will inevitably increase the number of operation procedures and make them more complicated. However, compared to the attention paid to information architecture and interaction in realizing intuitive user interfaces, less attention is paid to icons, and there are many examples where generic icons are used. Therefore, when icons and the functions they represent are different for each application, or when icons are unintelligible because of the distance between the user's mental model and the icons, the cognitive burden on the user is amplified, which may affect usability. We compared the usability of icons, one of the GUI elements, by focusing on their metaphors, and showed that the selection of metaphors that are in line with users' mental models has a positive effect on usability by improving the performance of task completion time and the number of errors. This study clarified the influence of the degree of congruence between the metaphor used and the user's mental model on the usability of icons, one of the GUI elements.

In this presentation we will investigate how Kansei Engineering and User Experience Design come together to solve real problems in a large healthcare organization; transcending the boundaries between physical and digital solutions and contexts. We will investigate examples from industry and various methodology for driving collaboration and culture change. We will also discuss the value and, perhaps more importantly, the responsibilities that come with participating in the engineering of sticky and infectious experiences. Organizational structures and other enabling details will also be explored.

Humans pursue well-being in their lives. Well-being encompasses positive emotions, life satisfaction, well-functioning, meaning of life, and self-growth (Andrews & Withey, 2012; Diener, 2000; Seligman, 2002). In ancient times, sharing is an intimate behavior which solidates strong community and lead to an ideal life (Price, 1975) which refers to well-being in the present. Sharing economy sheds light on a novel business model which people can develop well-being while sharing among strangers. However, prior research shows users participate sharing economy because of self-interest rather than social interaction or sustainability as we expected (Botsman & Rogers, 2010; Hamari, Sjoklint, & Ukkonen, 2016). Sustainable well-being is not only for ourselves, but for our communities, and our planet (Calvo & Peters, 2014). Thus, we investigate how the well-being components can be built in sharing economy and foster users to pursue it in the long run. This study reviews and synthesizes prior studies to (1) elucidate the well-being components in the P2P sharing economy, (2) model the sharing ecosystem with well-being components in a global view, and (3) propose the technological solutions of a P2P sharing platform to facilitate well-being. Furthermore, we provide examples of practice to illustrate the proposed model. We believe this study not only motivates platformers to take users’ well-being into account but promotes the sharing ecosystem to function sustainably and prosperously.

This study investigated and analyzed the relationship between leisure activities and subjective wellbeing among middle-aged people in China. Specifically, we conducted a web-based questionnaire survey of men living in Shanghai, one of the cities directly under the jurisdiction of the Chinese government, which did not show any significant change in the frequency of participation in leisure activities before and during COVID-19. Based on the survey results, we used SEM(Structural Equation Modeling) to analyze the relationship between the three categories of leisure activities and subjective wellbeing. The results showed that the disciplines classified as hobbies and sports sectors had a significant positive impact on positive emotions, one of the elements of subjective wellbeing.

The rapid development of e-commerce and impact of the pandemic may affect consumers' healthy behavior in purchasing OTC medicines. This study aimed to examine the relationship between Japanese consumers’ current behaviors of purchasing OTC medicines and literacy through exploring the digital experience of purchasing based on tablets. An online questionnaire was conducted in the Kanto region of Japan, which included questions on purchasing behaviors and medication literacy, and the Japanese version of the eHealth Literacy Scale. Of the participants who had experience in purchasing OTC medicines, 89.47% preferred to buy them at pharmacies or stores, whereas 9.47% tended to purchase them online ( χ2(2) = 271.50, p < .01); 64.24% accepted choosing medicines through a digital screen ( χ2(3) = 102.36, p < .01) and 85.26% obtained information through smartphones while purchasing OTC medicines at pharmacies or stores. Young consumers aged 20-29 years used smartphones significantly more frequently than those aged 30-49 years (p <. 01). There was a positive correlation between eHealth literacy and smartphone use (r = .24, p < .01). The results suggest that Japanese consumers prefer to visit a pharmacy or drug store to purchase OTC medicines. They also prefer to search for information about OTC medicines on-site with a digital device, such as a smartphone, rather than buying OTC medicines from online stores. The digital experience of a tablet-based purchasing system would be useful and acceptable for young consumers and those with high eHealth literacy.

Seimeikan, the sense of being alive might enhances motion graphics, makes it an effective communication tool, and affects human emotions. However, there is a lack of studies in terms of expressing a sense of being alive that focuses on human decision. The present study aimed to investigate the motion factors and find how motion affects the evaluation of sense of being alive. Two sets of motion graphics, artifacts and natural creature were used in the evaluation. The artifact set was composed of three levels of displacement (Linear), sine curve, and noise factors. The natural creature set was composed of data from fish locomotion. The findings of the study presented that (1) motion graphics based on natural creature were rated more positively than those that are based on artifact, (2) the motion graphics based on artifact showed the importance of noise factors, which highly correlated with expressing the sense of being alive compared to other factors. Moreover, it was found that high and low noise factors positively influenced the evaluation of the sense of being alive more than those without noise.

To provide evidence-based measures in health management and offer comfort services, it is important to assess emotions objectively. Recently, positive psychology has garnered considerable attention, and its effects have been verified as an early recovery effect during rehabilitation. In this study, to investigate the relationship between the biological responses corresponding to pleasant stimuli and elicited subjective strengths of pleasure, an experiment was conducted using sports videos with different pleasure strengths; in addition, biological responses were measured with collecting subjective ratings and analyzed. The 2-minute length video stimuli for the experiment were set, such that the elicited pleasant strengths differed in the preliminary survey. In total, 15 healthy adults participated in the study. Photoplethysmography, respiratory waves, electrocardiograms, and continuous blood pressure waves were measured and analyzed.

In the results, although the stimuli used here elicited pleasant emotions, a problem in setting the proper strengths still remained. Regarding biological responses, systolic blood pressure, pulse pressure, and combined parameters of blood pressure wave components exhibited significant differences between stimuli levels. Finally, the combined parameters of the blood pressure wave components exhibited responses of graded intensity, and the magnitudes of these parameters were correlated with subjective rating scores.

In the discipline of design science, the integration of cognitive, semantic and affective elements is crucial in the conception and development of designed products. Affective elements in IT artefacts have gain researchers interest, but little attention was given to Geographic Information System (GIS). This paper presents a research attempt to identify emotional response towards web-based GIS, and determine design influence to the emotion by applying Kansei Engineering (KE). The method involved ten selected web-based GIS specimen, 10 Kansei words as descriptors of emotional responses which was organized as a 5-point Semantic Differential (SD) scale to form a Kansei checklist. 50 participants were asked to rate their emotional responses toward the specimens into the Kansei checklist. Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Factor Analysis, and Partial Least Square (PLS) analysis were used to enable the research to achieve its objectives. The research discovered that the semantic structure of Kansei that shaped by the response was spaciousness and intenseness, and the significant Kansei concepts are formal and eye-catching. The PLS analysis have assisted the research to understand the significant influence of design to Kansei responses. These results provide cues for designers to design future web-based GIS with embedded emotion.

Data visualization is the processing of data, directed at a person, content, and purpose, to simplify decision-making for the person. In practice, does data visualization affect people's decision-making time? In this study, we formulate questions using tables and graphs for three data groups, with varying amounts of information. Twenty subjects are asked to answer the questions from least to most of information, and the time taken to answer them is measured. Following the experiment, the attributes of the subjects, including gender, age, occupation are obtained via a questionnaire. The experiment reveals that as information increases in the tabular format, the answering slows proportionally. In contrast, in the graph format, the responses do not slow down proportional to the increase in information. The relationship between the subjects’ attributes and the speed of answering is determined and some significant differences are found. Six patterns of relationship between the answering time for the tables and graphs are obtained. Subsequently, the relationship between these attributes and “change of flow from data to action (hereinafter called “the decision-making process”)” are examined in Kansei engineering, and the data visualization is found to be potentially effective at speeding up the decision-making process.

When purchasing home interior furniture and accessories, several factors determine what color to choose. People imagine how the item will look when it is actually placed in the room, and anticipate whether it will fit in the room or create the image they want. In order to help people make such decisions in stores and online shopping, we analyzed the relationship between room color and item color.Therefore, we prepared a home interior photo, processed the color of one item in the photo, and asked the subjects about their impressions. The color of the item was picked up from the colors used in the picture to harmonize with the impression of the room. Through the experiment, we found that even the color of a small item can affect the impression of the entire room, and that the color can easily change the impression.

Haptic technology provides users with an experience that is unattainable via audiovisual information alone. Researchers have previously attempted to synchronize tactile information with video to enhance the multimedia experience, although their studies were based on the assumption that visual information is present. Tactile stimuli usually act as additional information for a story and do not normally arouse people’s imagination regarding a story; a door opening, water dripping onto the floor, or someone walking across the floor is usually presented through visual information. In this study, we propose the “Otogi Box,” a cubic haptic interface that tells a story through tactile stimuli. The haptic interface provides a whole new user experience, letting them feel a story unfold in their hands. The interface independently vibrates each of its faces to provide various touch sensations using audio signals, in a manner that fits a specific story. We present “Dwarf’s House” as a demo story, wherein users feel that a dwarf realistically enters and exits the box. For instance, the right face vibrates as if a door is opening when the dwarf opens the door on the right side of the house. User evaluation was conducted to test the basic storytelling capabilities of the interface. The results revealed that the proposed interface could effectively present a simple story through tactile sense without any visual information, and enabled stimulation of users’ imagination in a unique manner.

It is well known that human sensitivity to color and expressive ability varies with age and gender. In addition, the perception, understanding, and comprehension of color vary according to developmental stage and color-related experiences.

This study is one approach to research to clarify the relationship between such "sense of color" as above and the developmental stages of children.

In this study, the coloring behavior of teenage subjects; elementary school, junior high school, and university students, to coloring book images were investigated using iPads. The characteristics of coloring and color schemes used in the coloring books were analyzed in order to explore the relationship with the developmental stages of the children.

The coloring book images; mandala-like patterns, used in the investigation were designed originally based on some preliminary investigations. Also the original palette of colors systematically arranged in hues and tones, was specified in order to quantitatively analyze the characteristics of the colors used in the coloring book.

The results showed that the hues of colors used with high frequency in coloring books changed as the developmental stage progressed, and that the range of tones by the combination of saturation and lightness widened.
It was also found that the color schemes were simple and easy to understand at younger ages, while the complexity of the color schemes increased as the children grew older.

To design affective spaces that promote stabilized living experience and user well-being, it is necessary to consider and be aware of how multiple perceptual information interact and influence the way we perceive space i.e. multimodal perception. This study aims to gain an understanding of how sensory cues influence the emotional evaluation of the spatial design. We analyzed how the change in levels of spatial elements was emotionally perceived in the presence and absence of scent and color. The results from the study presented that both scent and color significantly affected the emotional response to change in levels of spatial elements in different ways. The findings suggest that (1) in the absence of both color and scent, the spatial elements interacted to affect the participants’ moods related to being confused and feeling strained and tensed, (2) in the presence of a cool color (purple) and relaxing scent (lavender), spatial elements interacted to affect the participants’ mood related to feeling strained and tensed, (3) in the presence of a warm color (orange) and stimulating scent (orange), spatial elements interacted to affect the participants’ mood related to being unhappy. The findings of the study are worthy as they provide an insight into the influence of multimodality in spatial perception. They will help establish guidelines for incorporating perceptual information in spatial designs that provide stabilized living experience and enhanced individual well-being.

Previous studies have indicated that many patients with eye diseases are not adherent to eyedrops due to the difficulty in administration. The purpose of using eyedrop compliance aids is to help patients who have difficulties in administering eyedrops. However, this method has not been well recognized and accepted.

This study aimed to upgrade eyedrop compliance aids so that the adherence of eyedrop users could be improved. Among the research methods employed in this study, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) helped in proposing the best function sequence of the device, and a questionnaire based on the Kano model helped understand the degree of satisfaction with the existing products, as well as discover the appealing factors of their functions and examine their functional relationships. Finally, the results of the two methods were discussed and compared, and the results were used to identify the basic appealing factors influencing consumer satisfaction as well as provide the element attributes and significant features to be weighed in the design of eyedrops. This study suggested that in the design of eyedrops, both the physical and psychological needs of users should be taken into consideration, and reference indexes for aids design that may effectively improve user adherence to eyedrops should be proposed.

Falls are one of the major health risks that affect the quality of life among elderly peoples, but the elderly do not like to wear anti-falling clothing in their daily life as the anti-falling clothing are inconvenient, uncomfortable and not beautiful for the elderly to wear. The elderly clothing and anti-falling function have not been perfectly integrated. To prevent the elderly from being injured by falling and meet their pursuit of clothing, there is a need to integrate anti-falling function into elderly clothing with high satisfaction. This study aims to identify the integration strategies can meet the dressing effect that the elderly pursues in different scenarios using Kansei Engineering Type I. The design strategies for the elderly clothing with anti-falling function will be determined. A framework of integrating anti-falling function for elderly clothing with high satisfaction will be constructed. The results of this study can support the improvement of elderly clothing performance.

A method for estimating health conditions is required to monitor daily health conditions. Various types of data have been used in healthcare studies; however, imaging data are superior because they allow quick and remote measurements. Thermal face images can be measured safely and economically using infrared thermography. Many physiological and psychological states have been evaluated based on the data from these images. A previous study, using short-term experiments, confirmed that an anomaly detection model constructed using a variational autoencoder enables the detection of anomalous states of thermal face images. A long-term experiment is essential to estimate long-term fluctuating human states, such as health conditions. The purpose of this study is to construct a facial skin temperature-based anomaly detection model for human health conditions. The authors obtained thermal face images with health condition questionnaires for approximately a year. Based on the questionnaire responses, the thermal images in good and poor health conditions were labeled “normal state” and “anomaly state,” respectively. The facial skin temperature-based anomaly detection model for health conditions was constructed using a variational autoencoder with only thermal face images in the normal state. The AUC, which represents anomaly detection performance, was 0.70. In addition, an increasing trend of the performance of the model by learning a wider area of skin temperature was confirmed.

Many assumptions were made about people's dissatisfaction with their daily lives, such as debt burden, social problems, unstable economic conditions, health problems, cost of living, lack of job opportunities, lack of educational support, and so on. The positive or negative emotional experience is distinctive between individuals or groups of people who share similar life experiences. Thus, the purpose of this study was to explore the emotional responses of a specific population to daily obstacles that may be related to the mentioned scenarios. The Lokman's Emotion and Importance Quadrant (LEIQ)^TM, which was built on axes of emotion vs. importance, was used in this study to discover the importance of the identified indicators to the people’s happiness. The model is based on the idea that accurate strategies to improve people's quality of life can be devised by classifying indicators that contribute to people's emotions and understanding their importance to the people who interact with the stimuli. The findings of this study will eventually enable the identification of indicators that significantly influence people's positive or negative emotional states, which can then be used by stakeholders to devise effective strategies for future improvements.

In recent years, due to the active development of cultural and creative industries in Taiwan, cultural elements in exhibitions are often used in product design. Generally speaking, cultural and creative design elements exist in ordinary life and can be found in specific life. Although Tainan Art Museum in Taiwan aims to promote local art, it introduces a special exhibition of Japanese contemporary artist Yoshitomo Nara for the purpose of promoting modern art. Taking this special exhibition as a case, this research aims to analyze the attractiveness factors of the commodities in transnational exhibitions and discuss the essential spirit of the intercultural commodities. The research results put forward four attractiveness factors, that are practical feeling, satisfied feeling, mysterious feeling and unique feeling, for the formation of museum cultural commodities, can be used as a reference for the future product development and selection of art museums.

Indonesian design practitioners have shown interest in adapting the established cute visual culture, commonly used in Japan, to improve public service communication. This assimilation effort may enhance communication effectiveness; however, previous research has also shown that cultural factors can have a negative impact on communication effectiveness. We conducted this study to determine if and which public service poster impressions are affected by cultural factors.

We compare impressions of Japanese and Indonesian subjects when looking at selected manner awareness posters. We measure the intensity of impressions with an online survey method. Participants had to score the poster images based on ten impressions that were previously selected through a preliminary experiment and translation check process.

Fifty-nine Japanese (n = 29) and Indonesian (n = 30) adults participated in the survey. Impressions with major effect were realness and casualness, while Impressions with a slight effect were reassurance, playfulness, imaginativeness, importance, preference, and sharing intention. Finally, we found that the impression of cuteness and picture-text orientation were least affected by cultural factors.

We conclude that cognitively evaluated impressions, such as reassurance, realness, casualness, etc., appear to be more affected by cultural factors than cuteness. We confirm the universality of cuteness impression, which we may adapt for visual communication across different cultures.

In the new media environment, women are no longer the recipients of information, but rather the producers and consumers of information. The media image of women has become more diverse. Tik Tok is a product of the rapid development of new media, where women are empowered in many aspects of production, performance, distribution and reception. In many Tik Tok videos, women express themselves, with topics ranging from beauty and dressing to work and even gender relations. While this is a somewhat new look compared to the past, Chinese women are still influenced by traditional culture and there is still a hidden power manipulation behind it.

The study of Tik Tok is relevant to the construction of equal gender relations in Tik Tok and other short social videos. At the same time, as the age group of Tik Tok users is young, it helps us to understand the contemporary media position of women in the social video sphere.

This study collects the participation of some active female users in Tik Tok on public issues, analyses the most popular female short videos posted by female users in Tik Tok, and examines the media image of female users in Tik Tok platform using a qualitative research approach, supplemented by quantitative research. In this way, we analyse whether women's right to express themselves is being realised unconsciously and whether there is a qualitative improvement in the expression of women's voices compared to the traditional media era.

Due to the Corona situation, teleworking practices and relocations have increased, as people realize that they can do their jobs from any location. People have been relocating and buying land in remote and rural regions, away from the risks associated with the ongoing pandemic and inner-city living. The author of this paper has made a number of promotion films, documenting the initiatives of local people in the mountainous rural Ashimi district of Fukui Prefecture, and has been conducting research to verify and describe the results of these video expressions by comparing them to similar projects from different regions both in Japan and around the world. This paper Researched the works of Japan World’s Tourism Film Festival, which the author was also involved in managing, and used text mining to find keywords required to improve and objectively verify results.

This position paper questions the current situation of kansei studies as a multidisciplinary field of research. The observations on the structure of the research community and on the way papers address the notion of kansei point out the pluridisciplinary nature of the field, centred on the ill-defined notion of kansei. This situation is thought to be an epistemological issue, rather than a structural one. To address this epistemological challenge, we argue to shift towards complex thinking as a paradigm to rethink the field of kansei studies and the notion of kansei. Positioning kansei studies as a complex unit rich of multiple disciplines and of multiple perspectives on kansei lead to a richer dynamic within the research community, and open new ways of collaboration within the community and outside with related disciplines. Therefore, we call for this shift that may impulse a new dynamic in the community actually rich of a great variety of disciplines and practices.

On the rise of China-chic, diverse trends have surfaced in the Hanfu development because of revivification and innovation. Understanding the perception and acceptance of potential users is vital for Hanfu development as it develops genuine confidence in their national identity and traditional culture. This study investigated and discussed the Kansei aspect of perception and acceptance of users in the appearance and structure of Hanfu. The study aims to grasp of characteristics of Kansei to identify the diverse style of Hanfu images to help designers understand the market needs of Hanfu products style and improve the attractiveness of a product. Two types of Hanfu were selected for evaluation. All data were gathered and analysed using semantic differential methods, descriptive statistics, factor analysis and hierarchical clustering analysis. Results revealed from two kinds of Hanfu: S01 can be categorised as practical and modern traditional Hanfu images, whereas S02 represented original and adequate fashionable Hanfu images. Finally, this paper is the first empirical research in Hanfu using the Kansei engineering method from users' perception and acceptance.

Although mental disorders have become a serious social problem, social stigma such as prejudice and misunderstanding inhibit adequate treatment for the patients. It is important to monitor our internal psychological and emotional states to prevent unconscious progression of mental disorders. This study aims to realize emotion-reacting garments and accessories in real-time, based on a passive and continuous emotion recognition system. Firstly, emotion-reacting fashion design is discussed for intelligent garments and accessories interacting with our body and mind. Next, this paper proposes a systematic design for the emotion-reacting garments and accessories, which uses emotion estimation analyzing facial expressions. To realize this system, a functionally extended collar made of transparent polycarbonate material is designed for integrating with the digital camera modules. Further, this paper discusses how to create physical stimulus on the emotion-reacting garments and accessories. Visual stimuli using RGB LEDs on the intelligent garments and accessories are designed for reflecting the emotions. In terms of audio stimuli, emotion-related keywords are used to select music played in the intelligent garments. Finally, prototypes reacting to emotions are demonstrated.

To retrieve multimodal candidate solutions for real users, we investigated the effectiveness of an interactive evolutionary computation (IEC) method with an artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm. Using three types of bees (i.e., employed, onlooker, and scout bees), the ABC algorithm retrieves various candidate solutions. Our previous study showed the effectiveness of the IEC with the ABC algorithm while looking at various practical IEC parameters from a numerical simulation using a pseudo-user that imitates user preferences. The results showed that the IEC with the ABC algorithm could retrieve more multimodal candidates than the interactive genetic algorithm (IGA), the previous chief method of IECs. However, we did not examine the effectiveness of the IEC with the ABC algorithm for real users. In this study, we performed experiments to examine the effectiveness of the IEC with the ABC algorithm for real users using running shoe designs as an evaluation object. The investigations compared multimodal candidate solutions using the IGA method as a comparison tool, retrieving the performance of both methods. To evaluate candidates, we employed user gaze information to reduce user evaluation loads. The results showed that the evaluation time for evaluating candidates of the IEC with the ABC algorithm was shorter than that of the IGA method. Moreover, we confirmed that the IEC with the ABC algorithm could retrieve more multimodal candidate solutions than the IGA method.

We investigated the effect of men’s dress shirts on impressions of wearers’ motivation and performance in the workplace, and appearance. A ready-made commercial shirt was used as a reference. Four types of shirts associated with high status (a high-priced ready-made shirt, a custom-made shirt, a high-end brand shirt, and a luxury brand shirt) were presented either alone or with neckties, on identical mannequins. Fifty-one Japanese university students in their 20s and 85 office workers in their 20s to 60s evaluated their impressions of the shirts. We provided no information about the shirts. Compared with the standard shirt, the evaluations of some shirts associated with high status were higher in both groups of participants. However, the presence of wrinkles was associated with lower evaluations, even for luxury brand shirts. Wearing a necktie improved participants’ evaluation of appearance and impression for all shirts. Overall, the results revealed that dress shirts affected participants’ impression of wearers’ motivation and performance.

Kansei models were used to study the connotative meaning of music. In multimedia and mixed reality, automatically generated melodies are increasingly being used. It is important to consider whether and what feelings are communicated by this music. Evaluation of computer-generated melodies is not a trivial task. Considered the difficulty of defining useful quantitative metrics of the quality of a generated musical piece, researchers often resort to human evaluation. In these evaluations, often the judges are required to evaluate a set of generated pieces along with some benchmark pieces. The latter are often composed by humans. While this kind of evaluation is relatively common, it is known that care should be taken when designing the experiment, as humans can be influenced by a variety of factors. In this paper, we examine the impact of the presence of harmony in audio files that judges must evaluate, to see whether having an accompaniment can change the evaluation of generated melodies. To do so, we generate melodies with two different algorithms and harmonize them with an automatic tool that we designed for this experiment, and ask more than sixty participants to evaluate the melodies. By using statistical analyses, we show harmonization does impact the evaluation process, by emphasizing the differences among judgements.

In small musical groups, performers can seem to coordinate their movements almost effortlessly in remarkable exhibits of joint action and entrainment. To achieve a common musical goal, co-performers interact and communicate using non-verbal means such as upper-body movements, and particularly head motion. Studying these phenomena in naturalistic contexts can be challenging since most techniques make use of motion capture technologies that can be intrusive and costly. To investigate an alternative method, we analyze video recordings of a professional instrumental ensemble by extracting trajectory information using pose estimation algorithms. We examine KANSEI perspectives such as the analysis of non-verbal expression conveyed by bodily movements and gestures, and test for causal relationships and directed influence between performers using the Granger Causality method. We compute weighted probabilities representing the likelihood that each performer Granger Causes co-performers’ movements. Effects of different aspects of musical textures were examined and results indicated stronger directionality for homophonic textures (clear melodic leader) than polyphonic (ambiguous leadership).

The sustainable business must develop the fundamental technology for strategies that ensure people are interested in the information and contents for long periods of time. To contributes to this goal, this study was that a more realistic sense of boredom was evoked by the action of repeatedly listening to music in situations of repetitive consumption, based on the Meaning and Attentional Components (MAC) model defined psychologically boredom as two separate components of meaning and attention. Our experiment was the repetitively listening to the same music which had the highest or lowest level of preference, which was conducted over seven days respectively. Through electroencephalogram (EEG) measurements, decreased attention was measured by the increased alpha wave and the decreased beta wave. In addition, decreased meaning was measured by the increased gamma wave. In conclusion, measuring boredom must include factors of the temporal changes and the conditions of preference, particularly for EEG.

Sustainability labelling is commonly applied to consumer products. It is usual to find labels related to different sustainability aspects, such as environment, health or fair trade. Consumers with sustainability awareness will base their choices on how the product aligns with their values. However, consumer preferences about sustainability traits may depend on the specific type of product.

To determine whether perceptions on labelling about sustainable aspects differ between types of products, a study was carried out in which 73 participants chose between three versions of a same product, each version containing a sustainable label (environmental, social or related to health). Three different products for daily use were chosen: food (a milk carton), clothing (a t-shirt) and a personal hygiene product (a bottle of shampoo). For each product and aspect of sustainability, the labels were chosen among the best known. Participants had to select around various perceptions: quality, price, sustainability, trust, willingness to pay and general choice (preference).

The results show that, for some questions, the choice of the preferred sustainability aspect depends on the product. Therefore, it is concluded that the evaluation and decision criteria of sustainable labelling may vary, depending on the type of product to which it is applied.

Going green is increasingly important for many companies and consumers. The present research indicates that functional and emotional factors can achieve the best-perceived effects when choosing an environment-friendly product. Therefore, this study aims to gather these attractive factors from high-involvement groups by using Miryoku engineering. First, we capture them through the Evaluation Grid Method and use Quantification Theory Type I for quantitative analysis. Then, generalize four feelings about environment-friendly products, namely “Assured,” “Responsible,” “Safe,” and “Comfortable.” We also define a linear dimension with short-, normal-, and far-sight for locating attractive factors. The result shows that high-involvement groups are more concerned about the long-term impacts of “Responsible” feeling, while low-involvement groups focus more on the obvious benefits of “Responsible” and “Safe” feeling. Moreover, the emphasis on natural ingredients is necessary for achieving “Assured” and “Comfortable” feeling for both the high- and low-involvement groups.

This study focused on bird species in Taiwan, employing a spiral model to investigate the design and usability of an app for Taiwan's endemic bird species through simplified bird images, interactive framework, text icons, and user interface, along with heuristic evaluation and usability testing. The matching test results verified that the focuses of bird image design were on the color contrast of a bird's body part with the rest of the bird's body, overall tone, and the design/shape of a bird's body part. In terms of usability test results, the app system designed had a usability score of 74.773 with the level between "good" and "excellent"; and was rated "excellent" in dependency, stimulation, and novelty under user experience; was rated "good" in attractiveness and efficiency, and was rated "above average" in perspicuity. Furthermore, significant usability and user experience differences were observed between the interface using narrative and text icons in introducing bird information. Accordingly, when the same ecological information interactive framework is applied, the use of graphic rendering to create interfaces based on simplified bird images and text icons helps improve the usability of the system, as well as the attractiveness, perspicuity, efficiency, dependability, stimulation, and novelty of the system in terms of user experience.

Human emotions are within-person factors that function as a stimulus of an individual’s attitude and behaviour, either positively or negatively. From the organisational behaviour spectrum, concern over negative behaviour like Counterproductive Work Behaviour (CWB) is more prevalent due to tremendous negative effects on both employees and organisations. Although the impact of the affective states on CWB was empirically evident, there was an insufficient study that systematically reviewed the literature on such association. Hence, the present article adopts the PRISMA guidelines (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses) by integrating multiple research designs to investigate the emotional experiences-CWB phenomenon. The relevant literature review was selected from two established databases, Scopus and Web of Science. Based on the thematic analysis, two main themes (i.e., negative and positive affect) emerged as predictors of CWB at work. Subsequently, the sub-themes of discrete emotions were discussed as part of the study findings. In addition, this study comprehensively explained the significance of affective states on CWB. As a result, the study offers valuable insight into the body of knowledge and practical implementation for future strategies. The key takeaway is that creating more positive events and eliminating negative events are expected to be beneficial in elevating employees’ emotional well-being, hence reducing CWB occurrence.

Studies on Counterproductive Work Behaviour (CWB) have attracted wide interest among scholars. CWB is a subset of unethical behaviour that seems unbearable since it intentionally harms both organisations and people in the organisations. In general, literature holds that CWB is determined by work events and affective state. However, most studies are restricted to examining a single work event which prevents us from understanding the simultaneous effect of multiple work events. In addition, prior research widely utilised a self-reporting mechanism in capturing the affective experiences at work resulting in common method bias and other issues like time constraints, low response rate, etc. Drawing on Affective Events Theory (AET), affective work events, and CWB literature, this article provides an important extension to the CWB literature by proposing multiple work events that predict affective experiences and CWB at work. Additionally, the Kansei Engineering-Kawakita Jiro method is introduced as a substitute for the existing self-reporting mechanism in capturing affective work events. This article offers theoretical insights that may facilitate empirical research to explore the role of affective experiences within the CWB spectrum. The introduced conceptual ideas are targeted to be a useful guide for practitioners to craft appropriate strategies to combat employees’ CWB.

Utilization of teamwork for problem solving is pervasive. Teamwork is employed in classrooms to facilitate learning, but also as preparation for future vocational practice. It is used in research as collaborative ethos. Teamwork features in workplace tasks, leisure time projects, pursuing solutions to intractable trans-situated problems, etc. The space of teamwork is a public space of multidimensional assets. Inherent in it are benefits of collaboration, but it also brings with it challenges that have to be resolved in order for it to work effectively. We pursue the question of effectiveness of team function through team size, given certain identified benefits and disbenefits. We attempt to find out if there is an optimal small team size based on a few characteristics such as burden sharing, transactive knowledge and conflict (e.g. schedule conflict). We employ an agent-based model. For parameterization of variables, we take data from a short questionnaire completed by students and use its results to set values. We create small teams of different sizes and allow the dynamic model to aggregate those values as adopted by agents. We also attempt to see which one of four benefit/disbenefit valuation model specifications might work best. Although we find a team size with best scores, we do not believe the outcome could yet be claimed as conclusive.

This paper discusses the patterns of co-presence and related feelings and their relationship with social interactions in the dwellings of the contemporary Sri Lankan suburbs. Co-presence is the idea that the presence of other actors shapes the individual behavior and creates the base for social interactions (Goffman,1963; Giddens,1984).

Sri Lanka is a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural nation with three main ethnicities and five main social classes. To identify the lifestyle, patterns of co-presence and social interactions of each social group, this research has mainly focused on domestic places, in which a major part of their life is spent. The intensive case studies have been focused on Sinhala Lower middleclass which occupies the majority of the population and has the highest influence in the social dynamics of Sri Lankan society.

For this research two online field methodologies were developed to clarify the patterns of co-presence and feelings related to them in creation of social interactions. The findings of the research clarify that there are four main types of co-presence patterns which are related to functionality and frequency of co-activities of the co-presence occurrences. Among these types, co-presence occurrences with non-functional co-activities with less direction, more flexibility and higher level of repetition, are linked with feelings of relaxation, joy, and openness and lead to higher possibilities of social interactions.

The judgement of bodily attractiveness has been reported to be associated with the psychological process for detecting physiological health- and fertility- related features. Femininity of female gait is also related to its attractiveness. However, it is unclear whether the femininity is always attractive in female gait, and what physical characteristics are perceived as attractive and/or feminine. In this study, we aimed to understand the root of the attractiveness of human movement by examining the relationship between attractiveness and femininity in female gait. We first created 30-second gait animations by using 3D motion capture data of 10 female non-models and 7 female runway models, where they walked with barefoot or high heels. Then, 60 observers evaluated the attractiveness and femininity for each animation. We compared the scores of attractiveness (A-scores) and femininity (F-scores) between models and non-models, and we examined the factors related to the evaluation (A-scores and F-scores): walkers height, weight, BMI, and the characteristics of movements. As a result, both A-score and F-score were high for models’ heel gait. On the other hand, in the other conditions, there were two types of attractiveness-femininity relationship: linear relationship (high A-score and F-score, or low A-score and F-score) and unequal relationship (high F-score but low A-score). We also found that walkers‘ weight and lumbar bending motion were associated with the evaluation.

This study tries to investigate the visual perception of footwear with interchangeable uppers, by conducting semantic differential evaluations. Investigators designed six replaceable upper shoes based on casual footwear and able to convert to formal leather shoes. Young women's willingness to buy and fifteen Kansei adjective pairs with reference to the published results were used to evaluate twelve footwear design renderings, based on a seven-point Likert scale. Factor analyses were performed to analyze the differences and factors between two types (casual shoes and after shifting to formal leather shoes). In the factor analysis of footwear styles, five factors were identified for casual shoes: evaluation, attention, fashion, protection, and temperament; and five factors for formal leather shoes: attention, formality, fashion, weight, and protection. Fashion is a crucial factor that influences the willingness of young women to buy shoes, whether they are focusing on casual shoe uppers or dress leather uppers.

Keywords: footwear design, product emotion, customer perception, shoe upper replacement

The purpose of this study was to investigate the symmetry relationship between evaluation of smoothness and roughness of fabrics and the physical factors related to the evaluations, using a set of images obtained by photographing the surfaces of eight fabrics. These fabric surface images were created by setting the distance between the fabric and the camera at approximately 1 m and gradually reducing the distance for each of the eight fabrics. Based on these images, we conducted an experiment to evaluate the smoothness and roughness of fabrics on a seven-level unipolar scale. Results showed that the evaluation characteristics of fabric smoothness and roughness with consideration of the shooting distance of the fabric surface images differed for each fabric. Furthermore, analysis of the correlation between evaluation of smoothness and roughness of fabrics indicated that symmetry was not established between evaluation of smoothness and roughness of some fabrics.

With the widespread availability of Voice Assistants in smart devices, the usage of Voice User Interfaces has highly increased in the recent years. Although the anthropomorphized Voice Assistants present in these systems can aid users in many tasks, it also activates harmful gender bias and stereotypes. Since the usage of Gender Ambiguous voice agents in these interfaces is considered as solution for mitigating these gender effects, this paper analyzed different studies in the field of Voice User Interface design, while proposing a theoretical framework to design gender ambiguous voice agents, considering the type of recording, method of sound manipulation, method of evaluation for gender identification and contextual characteristics.

The purpose of this study is to visualize affective information that cannot be conveyed by symbolic notation alone, to enhance the musical experience of the hearing impaired. To represent the rhythm of music effectively and uniquely, we focused on Chironomie, which represents the structure of rhythm with emotional impression. In general, Chironomie is drawn by a curve corresponding to the score, which is determined by whether a short segment of the score represents one of two classes, Arsis or Thesis. First, we utilized the machine learning technique to classify Arsis and Thesis from the score as input. We conducted experiments to confirm the accuracy of the classification, and the usefulness of the estimated Chironomie in conveying the rhythm of music. In the latter experiment, four types of stimuli combining visual and sound information were used to confirm the effects of Chironome: score only, Chironomie only, score and Chironomie, and score and sound. Results showed that Chironomie has certain usefulness in conveying the rhythmic structure of a piece of music. This paper mainly focuses on evaluation experiments and discusses experimental and analytical methods under these experimental conditions.

Non-Linguistic Utterances (NLUs), produced for popular media, computers, robots, and public spaces, can quickly and wordlessly convey the emotional characteristics of a message. They have been studied in terms of their ability to convey affect in Robot communication. The objective of this research is to develop a model that correctly infers the emotional Valence and Arousal of an NLU. On a Likert scale, 17 subjects evaluated the relative Valence and Arousal of 560 sounds collected from popular movies, TV shows, and video games, including NLUs and other character utterances. Three audio feature sets were used to extract features including spectral energy, spectral spread, zero-crossing rate (ZCR), Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs), and audio chroma, as well as Pitch, Jitter, Formant, Shimmer, Loudness, and Harmonics-to-Noise Ratio, among others. After feature reduction by Factor Analysis, the best-performing models inferred average Valence with a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 0.107 and Arousal with MAE of 0.097 on audio samples removed from the training stages. This means that the model was able to predict the Valence and Arousal of a given NLU to less than the difference between successive rating points on the 7-point Likert scale (0.14). This inference system is applicable to the development of novel NLUs to augment robot-human communication or to the design of sounds for other systems, machines, and settings.

This paper reports on a specific cognitive behavior often found when trying to understand a text not written in readers’ native language. Our research group conducted a questionnaire survey to examine Japanese readers’ cognitive behavior and awareness when reading English texts. We also conducted a factor analysis on this questionnaire to identify the behaviors often found when reading English. Participants were 56 Japanese students studying engineering at Chuo University. After reading the texts, a questionnaire consisting of 43 items was applied to the participants. We used exploratory factor analysis to identify the primary factors related to readers’ cognitive behavior and awareness when reading a non-native language. As a result of the analysis, mainly based on the highest contributing factors, it was suggested that readers may have made substitutions into Japanese, their own words, when reading the English texts. In other words, when reading a non-native language, the reader may read the texts by replacing them with their native language rather than comprehending it in that language. Based on the results of our experiment, it is expected that the research on the cognitive supporting systems may help readers to understand non-native languages quickly and smoothly.

The value of diversity in education is highly emphasized in recent years, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, by many scholars. MOOCs have contributed the shift to online learning by expanding the range of available learning opportunities. They have gained popularity, especially in higher education by providing unlimited access to lectures and rich learning materials by renowned and respected academics in a wide variety of areas, with no restrictions and at very low fees. Besides, reasons for enrolling in a MOOC might vary according to the learners’ preferences on its instructional design as well as their emotions. Knowing this, creating more effective online courses that address affective issues would attract a broader spectrum of students and optimize the learning experience.

This study intends to reveal the emotional features of MOOCs to gain a better understanding of why learners choose a specific course among hundreds of alternatives available on MOOC platforms. The study uses Kansei Engineering methodology by enriching it with text analytics algorithms for extracting the learners’ emotions from the user reviews. The research methodology includes the collection of reviews from MOOCs and then the analysis of them through NLP techniques to identify Kansei words characterizing MOOCs, specifically for the courses in the field of Analytical/Quantitative Methods. The expected output of this study is a Kansei corpus for online courses related to the given field.

The Covid-19 pandemic has triggered changes in learning due to the practice of social distancing to curb the spread of the virus. E-learning platforms have become the main platform for learning throughout the pandemic. However, e-learning does have challenges when it comes to ensuring student’s optimum participation throughout the learning experience that require extensive research about techniques and methods for an optimum e-learning experience. This includes various e-learning supporting tools that provides easy communication and immediate assistance to enhance user experience. The supporting tools or software usability and functionality design determined as imperative in enhancing the e-learning user experience. Thus, this research proposes a conceptual model for designing the e-learning supporting tools based on the CUE Model, integrated with Kansei Engineering for optimum user experience that can serve as a guideline for the e-learning supporting tools designer. The outcome of this research will create new research fields that incorporate multiple domains, including the e-learning domain, software and supporting tools design, emotions and user experience.

In response to the post-epidemic relationship and other factors, the number of students who transfer from abroad is increasing day by day; at present, the time and reasons why such children choose to return to their hometown to study are extremely diverse, and they often appear in the nature of flow, emergencies and individual cases.

At present, more and more "international transfer students" appear in the education system of their hometown and their home country, and they are facing great difficulties in both academic and interpersonal relationships. Because of their lack of language skills, such children cannot successfully integrate into education system after returning to hometown. In order to protect students' learning rights and avoid becoming "guests in the classroom", this study starts from the social and cultural context of toys among elementary school children; Analyzed and explored their cultural background through evaluation constructs, user journey maps, questionnaires, and applied grounded theory in qualitative research, as well as their emotional ups and downs during the game. Explore objects meaning and relationship represented in the social culture of children, to explore the emotional motivation of school children and the preferences of product modeling. It aims to understand the relationship between personal emotional fluctuations, environmental and use behavior, hoping to create more possibilities for future curriculum development, and toy design.

We have developed a user-friendly and engaging virtual reality (VR) program called “Let’s stand up and travel the world!” which is used for performing sitting-down and standing-up rehabilitation exercises. This program allows patients to actively engage in rehabilitation exercises every day with the feeling of traveling while viewing images of landscapes from around the world. Because the achievement levels in the exercise plans are connected to the completeness of the images presented, the program helps patients to actively engage in rehabilitation exercises for long periods without becoming bored (patented). The progress of the program is guided by text and voice on the VR screen and can be executed by gazing at icons or by hand movements (touching virtual icons), achieving a universal design.

The effectiveness of using the program as a home rehabilitation program for the elderly was evaluated by asking an experimental participant to perform sitting-down and standing-up exercises. As a result, the participant was able to perform rehabilitation, which involved 30 standing and sitting movements, every day for 7 days. In psychological evaluation using a two-dimensional mood scale–short term (TDMS-ST), the mean scores for the “Level of Vitality,” “Level of Stability,” and “Level of Pleasure” significantly increased after performing the program’s exercises. The results show that the participant felt lively, excited, calm, and relaxed after exercises using the VR program.

The technical evolution of digital graphic technologies have allowed the photorealistic virtual representation of the physical world. This allows people to experience an enhanced sense of presence in virtual environments such as virtual reality (VR). It is a common conception that vision is the primary sense in virtual environments, and evaluations are performed by assuming that the virtual body was a default entity that solves the issue of improving sense of presence. There is no evidence presenting a comparison between how the same environment/stimulant in the VR space is evaluated when there is a virtual body versus no virtual body. How can we bridge the gap between the real world and the unreal world if we don’t look into it? The present study aimed to gain an experimental understanding of how virtual embodiment affects the individuals’ perception of body control and interaction with the objects in VR environment with a focus on visual perception. The findings of the study suggest that the sense of body ownership is more powerful factor than the sense of agency in regards to virtual embodiment in VR environment.

To examine the softness and impression of visual objects in VR (Virtual Reality) space, the impression of the visual stimuli in VR space was measured using the subjective evaluation of a seven-point scale by changing with each the value of the deformation resistance of the stimuli, of shapes, and of colors. The value of the deformation resistance of the stimuli expresses the degree of deformation to return to the original of the object when touching it in VR space. The lower value indicates the larger deformation like pudding and the higher one is the smaller one like thick rubber they were used three types of values lower and higher, and no-deformation of the objects. The shapes of objects as the stimuli were three shapes (sphere, cube, pyramid). The colors of the stimuli were selected from five colors (red, green, green, gray, white) and they were used two types of feeling of materials (matt and metallic) in each color. Ten participants were asked to subjectively evaluate the softness and impression of the stimulus. In the results, the evaluation changes from soft to hard by increasing the values of deformation resistance in all the stimuli in VR space. It is suggested that the degree of the deformation to return to the original can express the softness of objects when touching them in VR space even though the user does not touch them physically. It is also discussed the relationship between softness and the impressions of the stimuli in VR space.

This paper points out that Emotion is increasing its importance and it will play a central role in the coming days.

And Body Movement is deeply associated with its development and expansion.

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, companies have established exclusive chatbots to conduct conversational commerce and strengthen the emotional connection between customers and their brands. Therefore, shaping the chatbot personality to match the brand image is often the focus of chatbot design. This study investigates how users perceive chatbot personality via nonverbal communication (avatar, emoji, sticker) and explores the effect of chatbot personality on user satisfaction in a crowdfunding website. First, six chatbot conditions were selected using the Taguchi method. Then, an online survey based on the brand personality theory was conducted to investigate the impact of nonverbal communication on a chatbot's perceived personality. Based on the results, two chatbots with distinct personality traits, sincere and insincere, were selected as the conditions for the second experiment. Finally, participants interacted with one of the crowdfunding chatbots and received recommendations within FB messenger. One hundred fifty valid questionnaires and the click rate of participants during the experiment were collected to measure participants' satisfaction. The results showed that participants felt more satisfied with the "sincere" chatbot than the "insincere" chatbot. Furthermore, the personality of chatbots also affected participants' judgment on the message quality and the continuous intention to use chatbot services.

This research aims to develop an information-sharing system between customers and employees and try to put it into practical use. We named it "Caffe System (Customer Affection System)", a system for sharing customer service notes and customer feedback to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty and facilitate the sharing of customer information among employees.

As a non-mainstream service, "Message to customers" has been used by some stores. For example, Starbucks coffee is provided with a particular message service to impress customers: providing the drink with a message or illustration. But we have no way to know its specific impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty.

In this study, we launched the "cup message card", considering that we have been conducting demonstration experiments in a dine-in coffee shop. One of the focuses of this study was to investigate the satisfaction difference between "cup message card" and "conversation with clerks", which had already become one of the most mainstream service means.

Purpose of our research is to classify tea image at each shooting time.The flavor and quality of tea leaves change greatly depending on the time of picking.The more Umami ingredient “theanine”, the higher the quality.The more Astringent ingredient “catechin”, the lower the quality.Therefore, it is important to pick the tea at the timing when the theanine content is maximized.

In an actual farm, the timing of picking is decided at the leaf opening stage, not at the component analysis.The leaf opening period consists of 8 stages, from the germination period until the 7th leafopening period.As a rule of thumb, the highest quality is achieved at the 5th leaf opening stage.

Skilled technique is required to determine the leaf stage.We shoot a tea plantation with a large drone and analyze the shot image by deep learning.Analyzing each leaf opening stage leads to quality prediction.And I've been thinking about how to predict quality.

In order to determine the leaf opening stage, we tried to classify the images using a well-known method, Luminance histogram,Spectrum analysis by FFT and AKAZE.

However, none of the conventional methods were able to classify well.The cause is that it is difficult to extract the features due to the fuzzy of the tea image.

Therefore, we devised a classification method using deep learning.

We use DCGAN, SAE, LSTM and CWD.The originality of this research lies in the fact that these analyzes are not performed individually but continuously.

Today’s markets often offer different product solutions to the same customer need. In particular, new products offer new features requiring new customer behavior. This is typically driven by technology push, environmental concerns, or legal requirements. Due to inconvenience users do not easily change their behavior and thereby reject novel products unless they offer an obvious delight in the eyes of the user. Product developers need to take this in account when designing products. Tools such as UX, Kansei Engineering and Kano model are amongst those supporting product practitioners. This is exemplified by the affective evaluation of computer mice over three generations. It can be seen that in particular women have different affective needs in comparison to men related to auditive properties of mice. Hence it is important to adjust the user panel composition in accordance with the expected effect in order to avoid biases due to lacking diversity.

The study proposes a method for the assessment of e-shop product pages (PPs) through individual assessments of the touchpoints (TPs) customers interact with while using a PP (e.g., product title, main image, image gallery, Buy Box, rating/reviews number, product description, specifications, cross sales/recommended products, video, and product warnings) rather than an assessment of the product page as a whole. A specific Kansei list is created, customer preferences are collected, and touchpoints can be classified as positive, neutral, or negative (pain points). The assessment method was applied to the assessment of PPs of craft beer e-retailers. Once pain points were identified, two distinct types of TPs among them were individually analyzed (one visual, the Image gallery, and one textual, the Product description.) In both cases, a set of PPs were employed as stimuli and design elements that were deemed preferable by the customers were identified through Partial Least Squares analysis. The results provided valuable recommendations to web designers, content creators, and retailers for improving their PP content by taking into consideration the customers' emotional states and preferences.

There is an increasing demand for “natural” products by consumers, businesses, scientists and product developers. Trends suggest that the term natural may be colloquially understood to be a plant-based material or ingredient. This study investigates whether this trend could apply to polymers by declaring the derivation of the polymer as a plant or as petroleum. Because polymer materials do provide environmentally positive attributes for products in relation to other materials, such as lightweighting, durability, and lower fabrication energy requirements, it may be helpful to understand the influence of a polymer’s derivation on the perception of a polymer product’s sustainability. The goal of this study is to assess peoples’ relative perceptions of the sustainabilities of polymer drinking cups when the base materials from which the polymers were derived are exposed. A set of six injection-molded drinking cups was given to research subjects to analyze. Each cup is made of a different polymer. The polymers have derivations including petroleum, corn, sugar and trees. Participants evaluated the cups on six qualitative design strategies for sustainability, including natural-ness. This paper compares the perceived sustainable attributes of the cups, and which attributes were most strongly influenced by revealing the derivation of the polymers.

It is said that the relationship between “novelty” and hedonic response is expressed as an inverse U-shape. The latest studies about perception emphasize “novelty” as a factor of emotion and quantify “novelty” by assessing the difference in amount of information using Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. In this study, we proposed a novelty index of closed surfaces using KL divergence focusing on their curvatures. To calculate novelty index, we firstly calculated Gaussian curvature of each vertex in the shape. Then, we defined occurrence probability distribution which represents probability that a vertex has a certain curvature. The KL divergence expresses the difference between the occurrence probability distributions of the standard shape and the target shape. To confirm the effectiveness of the proposed index, we conducted the cognitive experiment using the shape samples of an automobile generated by particle swarm optimization method. The coefficient of determination between the proposed index and sensory evaluation values of “difference” were very high which support the applicability of the index. Furthermore, the consideration of location information increased the correlation with sensory evaluation. This suggests the possibility to evaluate an industrial design requirement quantitatively and contributes to develop the automatic shape generation in product design.

In recent years, deep learning has attracted much attention and various techniques have been proposed. GAN (Generative adversarial networks) is one such method. When images are used as the training set, this technique learns to generate new images that are indistinguishable from the images of the training set. Using this method, new face images of non-existent people can be generated from the face images of real people, or input images can be converted into the images with the style of a particular painter such as Monet.

In this study, using this capability of GAN, a method of generating a new product design from the images of customer's favorite products is proposed. The product images that customers evaluated as preferable in the kansei evaluation are used as the training set of GAN. Since the GAN generates images that are indistinguishable from the images in the training set, the new images generated are more likely to be preferred by customers.

In the case study, the proposed method was applied to the chair design. Subjects evaluated their preferences for images of various types of chairs collected from the Internet, and new chair images were generated based on the chare images that subjects evaluated as preferable. The generated chair images were first evaluated in terms of image quality, i.e., whether they looked like chairs or not, and how innovative they were compared to existing chairs, and then subjects evaluated their preferences.

Mouthwash prevents bad breath and sterilizes bacteria that cause dental caries and periodontal disease, so it provides important means for improving oral hygiene in our daily life. Along with active ingredients such as bactericides, mouthwash contains a variety of aromas to mask the bitterness of base ingredients and increase palatability. However, given that numerous aroma studies have demonstrated various physiological efficacies of aromas on autonomic/central nervous systems, it is no wonder that aroma mouthwash has some sort of physiological impact when it is used. In this study, we investigated the effect of aroma in mouthwash on peripheral and cardiac autonomic nervous system activity. The experiment was carried out in a within-subject design wherein 20 healthy women under 5 conditions, which are 4 types of mouthwashes: peppermint, bergamot + peppermint, orange + peppermint, and lavender + peppermint, and water as a control. Participants performed a 20-minute calculation task as a cognitive stressor, and then rinsing by a mouthwash or water. We evaluated the recovery period from acute stress response for 20 minutes after the task. As a result, it was observed that a mouthwash with citrus flavor had a relaxing effect in terms of subjective scores and recovering from physiological stress response. The results may illustrate a potential benefit of using aroma mouthwash.

In recent years, cross-modal effect in which perceptions interact with each other has been drawing attention. In the case of cross-modal effect between vision and taste, the effect of the angularity of shapes on taste has been widely studied while there has been little research on the other features of shapes. Previous research have shown that the emotional valence arisen from visual perception causes cross-modal effect between vision and taste. Therefore, this study focuses on the complexity of shapes as a visual stimulus to influence emotional valence and aims to confirm the cross-modal effect induced by its sensation. First, based on previous research, the hypotheses about the effects of the complexity of shapes on taste were made. Second, by using particle swarm optimization algorithm, closed curve shapes were generated based on curvature entropy, a quantitative index of the complexity of shapes, which indicates the randomness of curvature transition. Third, cup holders, which had these closed curve shapes on their sides, were created by using a 3D printer. Finally, by comparing the tastes of orange juice in these cup holders, the effect of the complexity of shapes on the perception of sweetness, sourness and intensity was confirmed. The results suggest that the complexity of shapes controlled by curvature entropy weakens the perception of sweetness whereas it enhances that of sourness and intensity. This finding can be used for reducing sugar intake in bottle packaging.

An objective assessment method for schizophrenia is highly needed. For this purpose, this study examined the emotional characteristics of facial stiffness, one of the indices for estimating patients’ flat affect states using average faces. First, we conducted an experiment to extract psychological evaluations of facial stiffness in 14 Japanese schizophrenia. 12 medical experts rated the facial stiffness of the patients in 127 videos using a rating program. Meanwhile, their gaze data were collected. In addition, 11 average faces of 14 patients and other one of 14 healthy subjects were created in order to extract the physical characteristics of facial stiffness. The results of the emotional analysis showed that the average faces of the healthy subjects and patients were different proportions of 8 emotions. The faces of healthy subjects were "calm" with a confidence level of 99%. On the contrary, the patient's face contained 15% to 65% of emotions other than "calm," such as "anger" and "sad. In images in which the emotion of "anger" was easily identified, the gazing points tended to be concentrated around the eyes. On the other hand, images in which the gazing points were widely distributed may have been difficult to identify because they were not typical emotional expressions. Therefore, it is suggested that there are two types of criteria for judging facial stiffness in schizophrenia: the emotional expression of "anger" and a mixture of features of "anger," "sad," and "calm.

In recent years, significant research has been conducted on the use of deep learning for prediction of facial attractiveness. These studies are expected to have various applications such as recommendation systems and face beautification. Therefore, it is crucial to improve the prediction accuracy. In this study, to improve the accuracy of facial attractiveness prediction, several convolutional neural network-based models were built using sex-specific datasets. Then, their accuracies were compared. The results showed that VGG19 and VGG16 had the highest accuracies for the male and female face datasets, respectively. A detailed confirmation of the factors necessary for prediction is expected to contribute to the construction of models based on human perceptual characteristics. These models maybe utilized in various engineering applications.

The purpose of this study is to determine the amount of information that is interesting to users on a landing page for the purpose of purchasing a product. In this study, we clarified the amount of information that attracts the interest of users and what kind of information changes the interest of users. Specifically, we created three types of landing pages with different amounts of information for three products, and conducted an impression evaluation questionnaire. The three types of information on the landing pages were: (1) product image, product description and catch copy, (2) (1) with additional campaign information, and (3) (1) with additional product sales results and satisfaction levels. Using the impression evaluation data obtained after the questionnaire survey, we conducted a factor analysis for each product and analyzed the factors that influenced the evaluation. In addition, we clarified the website design that made a difference in the willingness to purchase the products and the evaluation items that caused the difference using t-test. As a result, it was found that users' willingness to purchase increased when information such as campaign information and actual results were included, and that reliability affected the willingness to purchase, especially for products that are used for a long time.

Regardless of going online or physical shopping, expectation disconfirmation due to the discrepancy between pre-purchase and post-purchase evaluation may occur from time to time. Thus, this study takes the tumbler as an example and aims to explore the reasons behind, as well as finding a suitable solution. It is hypothesized that the change of sensory dominance in product interaction from purchase to real use might lead to expectation disconfirmation. More specifically, if the user-product interaction during purchase can be better designed to ensure the consistent sensory dominance with real use, there is a chance to avoid expectation disconfirmation. A set of five scenarios of user-product interaction was first proposed by investigating the daily-use behavior of tumbler users. 15 female participants with the experience of tumbler use were then recruited to experience the traditional product interaction during purchase first. After at least three weeks, they returned to experience the new manner of user-product interaction during purchase. Subsequently, each participant took a tumbler home to use it for four consecutive weeks, during which she was required to provide subjective responses at the end of each week. Results showed that there is no sufficient evidence that ensuring consistent sensory dominance during purchase with real use can avoid expectation disconfirmation. Nevertheless, the findings through interviews support the need for doing so.

In the informatized era in which the graphic language has been the advantaged communication, design and digital culture construct cultural ecology of diversified design together, which promotes that the thinking, concept and aesthetic style of design present unique cultural value. Design public welfare posters with graphic elements full of emotions, namely perceptual graphic elements, based on perceptual image elements with visual innovation and the spreading effect of modern public welfare posters and combining with the updating of media and application of digital technology. The research included the investigation on the relationship of the new media literacy as an intermediary variable and the interest and confusion of aesthetic model. The research aimed to achieve the following goals: Research what effect the AI artistic creation will have on appreciators and whether the effect is great different from that from the creation of human artists. Standing by the needs of mass audience, evacuate new ideas and new modes for public welfare posters design, attempt to surpass the two-dimensional formal graphics, speed up the transformation upgrading of traditional public welfare posters. The result shows that it’s greatly critical to study the psychology of mass audience of public welfare posters and it’s also important to give full consideration to perceptual elements, visual experience and technological media.

Product recommendation systems have been instrumental in online commerce since the early days. Their development is expanded further with the help of big data and advanced deep learning methods, where consumer profiling is central. The interest of the consumer can now be predicted based on the personal past choices and the choices of similar consumers. However, what is currently defined as a choice is based on quantifiable data, like the product features, cost, and type. This paper investigates the possibility of profiling customers based on the preferred product design and wanted affects. We considered the case of vase design, where we study individual Kansei of each design. The personal aspects of the consumer considered in this study were decided based on our literature review conclusions on the consumer response to product design. We build a representative consumer model that constitutes the recommendation system's core using deep learning. It asks the new consumers to provide what affect they are looking for, through Kansei adjectives, and recommend; as a result, the aesthetic design that will most likely cause that affect.

The negative attitudes towards robots scale (NARS) was applied widely in the robot-human interaction research field. However, robots' various occupations and roles have not been discussed when studying the negative attitudes towards robots. In this research, we aim to explore whether the occupation of robots could influence people's negative attitudes towards robots. The service robot and security robot, two types of robots that may be widely used, were used in the NARS-related study for the first time. We conducted the online questionnaire research, including three separate parts: negative attitudes towards robots, negative attitudes towards service robots, and negative attitudes towards security robots. The results of the online survey collected from 114 participants (54 females and 60 males) highlighted differences among the scores of people's negative attitudes towards service robots and the negative attitudes towards robots or security robots. People show the lowest negative attitudes towards service robots. There are no significant differences between the negative attitudes towards robots and security robots. This research supported the hypothesis people show different levels of negative attitudes towards different types of robots in the occupational division. These results provide a helpful indication for the study and design of robots with various occupations in the robot industry.

This paper proposes a method of conveying a driver’s intention to yield by blinking automotive lighting. Generally, headlight flashing indicates a driver’s intention to yield to another driver or pedestrians in Japan. However, this signaling method can have several meanings, including warning other drivers of road dangers such as crashed cars, or informing other drivers of the presence of a pedestrian. There is a possibility of a misunderstanding, increasing the risk of accidents. Therefore, we have investigated an effective method for facilitating communication in traffic. This study focuses on nonverbal communication in which blinking lights convey the driver’s intentions to others. In this study, visibility is not considered. Nine blinking patterns that changed the light colors, waveform, and blinking cycle were presented to fifteen healthy participants, and visual impressions were evaluated to identify the most suitable blinking patterns. These nine patterns indicate a driver’s intention to yield to pedestrians and other drivers. The results indicated that a blue-green blinking pattern in which luminance changes with a triangular wave pattern with a one-second cycle was best conveyed the intention to yield.

Some assistive devices (ADs) aim to ease elders performing daily activities by changing postural and strength requirements. Elders usually have cognitive lacks too, making AD usability perception an important issue. Usability perceptions arise from the affordances conveyed by the AD: design features should act as signifiers transmitting opportunities of how to use the AD. This study assesses the perception of jar openers usability. Eye-tracking (ET) data from 56 subjects were used. Rendered images of 6 ADs were shown, in 2 versions: with and without rubber on the grip area. Each slide showed the 6 ADs, each AD image being an area of interest (AoI) to be tracked. The participants ranked the ADs in the next usability affordances: comfort, effort level, easiness to grip, easiness to use, lid slippery and robustness. For each affordance, they were eye-tracked while deciding the best AD, and afterwards they ranked the other ADs. The ranks were transformed into scores, and their correlation with ET parameters (decision time and number of fixations on each AoI) were studied, along with the effect of the rubber on the scores. Heat maps were also analyzed to identify the signifiers of the ADs that attract attention on usability. The results showed the potentiality of ET to study the perception of ADs usability affordances, and that the addition of rubber on the grip area of the jar openers or the material and shape of the lid area have an effect on their understanding and use.

In a KE study to determine the emotional design features of a traditional product from Turkey, expert designers’ opinions were collected for the span the semantic space and span the space of properties steps of the KE methodology and an additional discussion came up. It was noted that the expert designers raised several questions about KE. They seemed to approach the potential KE results with caution because it was perceived as an intervention to their creative processes.

During the interviews the following arguments came out: Design problems are irrational and wicked and do not have only one solution. What KE offers is scientific, but it may interfere with the creative process needed for designing. It can be useful for novice designers, but some experts think that they already have the intuitive knowledge of Kansei.

After discussing with other KE researchers, about the similar experiences working with expert designers, there was the need to explore the issue in more detail.

First, interviews were conducted with 4 expert designers. A scale was developed to assess their attitudes towards using KE results in design problems. Data was collected with an online questionnaire from 49 experts on the scale. The findings can be used in creating new strategies to introduce KE to design experts in a way that they can be convinced to use KE in their further design processes.

Both the disciplines of design and statistics have promoted projects and research with clear objectives in their field, but for the other discipline, they have been difficult or challenging to fully understand.

In design, there are a large number of projects that provoke a reaction in spectators or users, since they have a spectacular scope and impact, but at a statistical level, their results add little value. On the other hand, statistics in some of the models and applications that are often used, the requirements are highly complex and numerous. This makes it difficult to put theory into practice since experiences or experiments that are so complex and difficult to manage cannot be carried out. In addition, later the communication process for non-experts is difficult to understand due to a large amount of information, as well as on occasions poorly designed presentations.

After understanding the limitations that the two disciplines have, their ability to work together and make the weaknesses of each of them a more complete and holistic solution is evident. Kansei engineering is also a good example since it is a complex design tool, and the only way to advance it, incorporating the use of data, is with the collaboration between designers and statisticians. In this paper, the Data Collection Toolkit is presented as a result of applying Kansei Engineering to unite these two disciplines including for each step some methodologies, resources, and tools for designers.

In this study, we regarded the idea that supplementary variables and Multiple Correspondence Analysis are promising for analysis and visualize complicated relations in Kansei analysis. It could merge several different information tables and then project them into a map. Applying this advantage would make the overall view of Kansei. Design elements, samples, and associated Kansei words were shown in an MCA map. Leather patterns of children’s lower leg orthotics are the objective of this Kansei evaluation. The leather surface was simulated with 3D CG with physically based rendering methods.

The aim of this paper was to systematically explore the knowledge landscape of papers presented at KEER conferences over the last decade. We collected all papers published in conference proceedings between 2010 and 2020. We (i) used a text mining pipeline to extract, clean, and normalize keywords from the Title and Abstract fields, and (ii) created a co-occurrence network reflecting the relationships between keywords. The network was then characterized at different levels of granularity (static analysis vs. time slice analysis and whole network vs. node-level analysis). The exploratory analysis showed a stable expansion of the network over time. The cluster structure revealed several groups of keywords that did not change over time and reflected both domain-specific and method-specific topics of Kansei research.