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The purpose of this study is to investigate the emotions implied in the form of bentwood chairs, and to understand the design features of the product, for helping the planning of the future development of the market, and letting more people familiar with the beauty of bentwood chair. Based on the three levels of emotional design (visceral level, behavior level and reflection level), this study analyzed users' perception of products. The questionnaire survey and the focus groups method were employed to obtain the survey samples, and then the semantic differential method was used to understand the relationship between the bentwood chairs form and emotional vocabulary. The data were statistically analyzed by factor analysis and cluster analysis. The results of the survey were presented in the image map of cross analysis. The image of bentwood chair form was further analyzed and the design trend of bentwood chair was observed. The characteristics of bentwood chairs found out in this study were as follows. 1. The style of bentwood chairs was both plain and modern. 2. The overall form of bentwood chairs tended to be curry and streamline. 3. The overall satisfaction with the comfort and practicality of bentwood chairs was low. 4. The usage environment of bentwood chairs mostly tended to be leisure. 5. The consumer preferences for the design of bentwood chair with explicit style were not easy to change over time.

The purpose of this paper is to derive the suggestion towards to the design guideline of Personal Mobility (PM) for giving a good visual impact for the pedestrian. For this purpose, first of all, pre-experiment has been done to briefly evaluate the impression to the whole body size of PM by using Semantic Differential method and factor analysis. From the results, it turned out that big PM is associated with heavy or high rigidity feeling, and then they had a negative impression. Next, conjoint analysis was done to find the answer to “Which component gives the strongest influences to the pedestrian's impression?” The results showed that pedestrian's impression to the PM is dominated by PM's height. The derived suggestions are as follows: “The height of PM should be low as much as possible” and “The body width should be wide (about 600mm), although the importance of it is low compared to the body height.”.

It's a vital issue in form design of home service robot to quantify consumers' perceptual cognition, summarize the general law and convert consumers' requirements to design elements of new products. Kansei Engineering is used to analyze existing products in this paper, which proposes the design elements based on the attribute of affinity and contributes to seven new design schemes and the prototype of final design scheme. This procedure can provide one kind of more precise and rational method in form design of home service robot.

We investigated the correspondence relationship between vibrotactile stimuli and tactile mental imagery using a vibrotactile glove proposed in a previous study as an interface for vibrotactile stimuli [1]. The mental impressions of the vibrotactile stimuli obtained by the human subjects were measured using the semantic differential method. Analysis of variance, multiple comparisons, and factor analyses were used to extract and evaluate the distinctive imageries induced by passive touch, based on the answers of the subjects to certain questions. To build a cognitive model of tactile sensations, we investigated the correspondence relationships between tactile sensations and vibrotactile stimuli.

The conventional studies on mascot characters were evaluated subjectively. In this study not only subjective evaluations using the SD method but also objective ones with biomedical signals and response time were performed for the evaluations of the mascot characters. The result of tests and researches showed that there was a correlation between brain wave event related potential and response time for the character cognitions and, mascots' acceptability also played a major role to their popularities besides "cuteness" and "weirdness". Under these results, local governments' mascots were picked up respectively and a research was conducted on what kind of effects they made for attracting interest to local governments, which led to the conclusion that the local governments, featuring mascots with distinctive and understandable motives in order to explain their products and cultures, succeeded in getting more interests than the ones with undistinguished and weak characters.

When we perceive a colored shape, how the aesthetic evaluation is affected by the color or the shape. This study investigates the effect of color and shape on the aesthetic evaluation of colored shape. We used 16 shapes and 12 colors. 16 shapes were varied the magnitude of shape parameters that correspond to the three dimensions of curvedness, regularity, and complexity. 12 colors were selected from Munsell color system. In the experiment, different two groups of participants were assigned the task of rating 8 shapes, 6 colors, and 48 colored shapes on three scales with seven-points, according to the semantic differential method. These scales were constructed of three adjectives regarding the aesthetic evaluation, which are like-unlike, pleasant-unpleasant, and beautiful-ugly. First, we examined the one factor structure, which is the aesthetic evaluation, by the factor analysis. Next, the multiple regression analysis was used to predict that of colored shape from the aesthetic evaluation of color and shape which had been obtained separately. This prediction was successful as indicated by high R2 values to multiple correlation coefficient. The analysis indicated that the aesthetic evaluation of colored shape was influenced on both of the color and shape component, however, the shape component had stronger influnce on that of the colored shape than the color component. The analysis for each scale; beauty, pleasantness, and liking also showed the similar results. Moreover, we analyzed the effect of color and shape on the aesthetic evaluation of colored shape considering shape psychophysical features. As the results, in the case of regular shape stimulus set, the effect of color component was higher than that of shape component.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the wearing comfort of polypropylene (PP) clothes thorough measuring material properties and physiological and psychological responses. PP fiber has low thermal conductivity, is hydrophobic, and has a lighter specific gravity. These features are useful in a clothing material. PP fibers have attracted much attention in the apparel industry. We assumed that PP is a good material for a comfortable warm-up underwear, since PP clothes would prevent the decreases in skin surface temperature when perspiring. Material properties measurement were made according to Kawabata Evaluation System (KES) and Japan Industrial Standards (JIS). We examined the characteristics of the samples, and then narrowed down the samples by cluster analysis for the clothing experiment. After that, we conducted an experiment measuring the physiological and psychological responses in the state of wearing a sample while warming up the lower limb. Physiological response measurements were electrocardiogram (ECG), respiration, and the temperature and humidity in the clothes. Psychological response measurements were by semantic differential method and ranking method. We calculated LF/HF as an indicator of autonomic nerve activity by ECG. Then we created a comfort indicator called SAC from the LF/HF and humidity in clothes. Order by ranking method corresponds with ranking by SAC. We concluded that PP clothes are comfortable when perspiring.

We studied the relationships between the acoustic fluctuation properties of music and the emotional evaluations of music as a component technology for an automated song selecting system based on instinct and human emotion. When people listen to music, they select songs reflect their own feelings at the time, and then they emotionally evaluate the song. We believe that our emotional evaluation of songs are influenced by the fluctuation properties of both the volume and pitch of songs. Thus, we focused on the fluctuation properties containing dynamic ideas concerning music, and extracted thirty six fluctuation properties concerning both the volume and pitch from each song using the Fast Fourier Transform. We also prepared a subjective evaluation experiment for plural songs using the Semantic Differential method, and obtained an emotional evaluation of the songs. Then, we studied the relationships between the extracted properties and the emotional evaluations of the songs by conducting a multiple discriminant analysis. As a result, a high percentage of the questions were answered correctly and low discriminant errors were shown, and therefore, we suggested that the fluctuation properties of the songs influenced the emotional evaluations of them. Furthermore, we confirmed the especial properties related with the emotional evaluation of the music by taking into consideration the coefficients of the liner discriminants of the canonical variates that describe the discriminant spaces.

Facial expressions play important roles in face-to-face communication. Smiles, especially, are frequently displayed and seen and generally provide a positive impression. Recently, various methods of training to improve the physical form of the smile have been proposed and applied by some businesses and organizations. However, previous methods have not considered how observers feel about trained smiles, although these observers are among those responding to trained smiles. In this study, differences in impressions of three smile patterns that differ in duration (fast: 275ms, normal: 550ms, slow: 1100ms) between smilers and observers were analyzed with Target Smile Expression Support (TS-ES). Data obtained by the semantic differential method were analyzed. TS-ES has been proposed as an objective method for describing quantitative aspects of smiles. Our results reveal a tendency for smilers to have relatively more positive impressions to smiles expressed in 550ms, whereas untrained observers have relatively more positive impressions of smiles expressed in 275ms.

Base on SD Scales, the research try to find out human's sensibility to large-scale agricultural machinery's color. By dealing with data from the scales by Factor Analysis method, the study extracts two principal components of human's sensibility to agricultural machinery. Then by serving the two components as X&Y axis, an image scale of agricultural machinery' color is made, which can shows some laws of human's sensibility to agricultural machinery's color. Finally by a contrast test, the paper attempts to find whether environment will influence human's sensibilities to Agricultural Machinery's Color.

This paper proposes a useful method driving the electric vehicle by EMG signals (Electromyographic signals), those frequency components are filtered according to strength of muscular tension. This signal is able to be measured from all the people easily, even physically handicapped people, elderly people and so on. Here, EMG signal contains various frequency components. From this characteristic, we assume that specific bandwidth of frequency components has strong relation with strength of muscular tension and muscular tension becomes stronger as higher frequency component is stronger. Consequently, frequency components of EMG signal are filtered to specified bandwidth for driving the electric vehicle. By our method, user is able to control speed of the electric vehicle by strength of muscular tension. The method of speed control may give user good or bad operation feeling in the meaning of SD (Semantic Differential) method and factor analysis. We experiment on EMG interface in cases of using filters or not to reveal the influence of operation feeling. As a result, it is shown that operation feeling is in fluenced by speed control.

To clarify the effects of the temporal structure of sound and motion pictures on the impression of audio-visual contents, the impression of various kinds of audio-visual combinations was measured by a semantic differential method. The experimental variables of audio-visual stimuli are the speed of the motion picture, the tempo of the auditory stimulus and the temporal relationship between the visual and auditory accents. The synchronization of visual and auditory accents raises the subjective congruency of the audio-visual contents. The matching of auditory tempo and visual speed also affects the subjective congruency. The subjective impact is stronger as the speed of the motion picture becomes faster. The accent synchronization also contributes to the strong impact of the audio-visual contents. The subjective "lightness" is determined by the musical tempo. Faster music causes a lighter impression of the audio-visual contents. The subjective complexity is based on an imbalance between the visual and auditory speeds. The mismatching of musical tempo and visual speed evokes a complex feeling of audiovisual contents.

This paper reports the design of an excavator's control panel with a sensory engineering approach. Nine panel designs were evaluated using the semantic differential method. Results showed the strength and weakness of each design, which can be incorporated by the designers into the final design.