The feasibility of PrEmo in cross-cultural Kansei measurement

Abstract

Kansei Engineering has been successfully used as product design technology inducing human emotion in its quality value. It has in its perspective that Kansei is unique for different domain and that it is unique for different target user group, and results from the evaluation of human Kansei have uniqueness in different cultural races and demographical background. Although the success is proven, the technology has shortcoming when there is a need to build universal design for universal target user. Therefore, we need to have a non-verbal cross-culture emotion measurement tool which could enhance the capability of K.E. in the measurement of universal Kansei across cultures. This study aims to investigate the feasibility of using a nonverbal, animation based emotion measurement instrument called PrEmo to measure Kansei as a solution to universal Kansei in a cross-cultural environment. The feasibility was analyzed by performing a comparative analysis of Kansei structure with the use of PrEmo with two different cultural races. 10 websites with significant visual design differences were used as stimuli in the evaluation procedure involving 30 subjects. The resulted Kansei structure from the comparative study shows that there is encouraging results to show that PrEmo could be used to measure Kansei. Future research is required to cater the measurement of Kansei that are not limited to the 12 general emotions as suggested in PrEmo.