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.

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.

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.