Kansei Engineering and Ergonomic Design of Products

Abstract

The main purpose of this article was to describe the concept of Kansei and its status in ergonomics, to specialists of disciplines such as safety, industrial engineering, and specifically the associates of ergonomic design of products and industrial designers. During last decades the dominate approaches of ergonomics were mainly focused on physical aspects of human body, but along with the development of sciences, it has had a dramatic growth in human mental characteristics and has expanded from physical to cognitive, aesthetic, and recently affective domains. This study includes two parts of descriptive and review study. In the descriptive phase the scopes of ergonomics and its new approaches were focused, while in the review part by choosing the appropriate keywords, the published articles in three scientific databases were searched in the context of subject. In addition, in the basis of obtained data with an emphasis on the relevancy of ergonomics and Kansei Engineering, the position of Kansei Engineering in the growing discipline of ergonomics has been analyzed due to the authors’ perspective. In this study, recent trends in ergonomics approaches and some concepts of cognitive ergonomics and its relationship to Kansei were considered.