Abstract:Currently little is known about how the color of non-edible items such as tableware affect people's perception of food, emotional responses and mood in dining activities. The emotional responses and mood during dining activities are considered more easily affected by colors. In this study, we conducted an experiment to understand Japanese female participants' preference and association about 8 different colors. We also designed 6 different illustration indicating typical dining situations to evaluate the perception of dining activities and color preference in each dining situations. Analysis of variance and correlation analysis were carried out to detect the significant differences between preference of colors and the relationship between color selection and adjective words. The results showed the tendency of light color being preferred to dark color, and explained that different dining situations evoked different mood and interpretation, which might lead to different choice of colors for tableware.

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Olfaction-based interaction is considered as a new frontier in digital communication. There are increasing range of new products attaching scent diffusers to personal electronic devices (personal computer, smartphone, etc.). In stead of enriching the virtual reality experience, we intended to investigate the effects of scents in the experience of using application software that has no correlation or association with scents. By conducting two experiments, it was shown that different scents influenced user experience in different ways on emotion and performance. Stimulating scents (essential oils) influenced emotion both positively and negatively when using different applications such as games and productivity software. On the other hand, relaxing scents (tea leaves) had positive effects on the performance of productivity software. The study suggests that the inclusion of scent in the design process of personal electronic devices will be significant even the specific application software or function has no association or correlation with scents.

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The market of e-book has been growing fast and showing a great potential recently. However, the traditional printed books are still predominating the major market. Most people still prefer printed book despite e-book's advantages. In this study, we conducted an experiment involving 34 participants to determine the difference between e-book and printed book in terms of user experience. We hypothesized that different contents would influence the result, therefore we chose two different genres of books: magazine and the Japanese comic book -manga. Participants were asked to read on E-Reader and printed book, then asked to evaluate their experience using questionnaire. ANOVA, Wilcoxon signed-rank test, multiple regression analysis and principal component analysis were conducted to analyze the difference between each group and correlative factors that affected overall evaluation. The result indicated that printed books were rated higher than e-books, and manga was more applicable to e-book than magazine.