Systematic Study of Kawaii Products: Relation Between Kawaii Feelings and Attributes of Industrial Products

Abstract

In Japan, the cute aesthetic is abused by many organizations and for many purposes including police mascots, and warning signs for dangerous areas. Although using cute to motivate and inform might seem strange, cute does offer potential. Dr. Cheok and his team at the National University of Singapore argued that Japanese ‘kawaii’ embodies a special kind of cute design, which reduces fear and makes dreary information more acceptable and appealing. Various Japanese kawaii characters such as Hello Kitty and Pokemon have become popular all over the world. However, since few studies have focused on kawaii attributes, we systematically analyze the kawaii interfaces themselves: kawaii feelings caused by such attributes as shapes, colors, and materials. Our aim is to clarify a method for constructing a kawaii interface from the research results. Kawaii might be one important kansei value for future interactive systems and industrial products of Asian industries. We previously performed experiments and obtained interesting tendencies about such kawaii attributes as shapes, colors, and sizes. Although questionnaires are the most common form of kansei evaluation, they suffer from such demerits as linguistic ambiguity, the possibility of mixing the intensions of experimenters and/or participants into the results, and interruption of the system’s stream of information input/output. Thus, to compensate for these demerits, we examined the possibility with biological signals. In this article, these experiments and their results are outlined.