Kawaii Rules: Increasing Affective Value of Industrial Products

Ohkura, Michiko; Komatsu, Tsuyoshi; Aoto, Tetsuro

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-04798-0_8

Cited by 20 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 2 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Apart from animated characters, certain colours, such as ‘simple white, pink and pastel shades’, are found to be effective indexes for a cute aesthetic (Kinsella, 1995: 229). In addition, Ohkura et al (2014) found experimental evidence that warmer colours are perceived to be cuter than colder ones and almost all hues, despite slight gender differences, add to the cuteness of clothes. They also reveal that shape and size, specifically curves, roundness and smallness, are another dimension of a cute design.…”

Section: Cute Clothes: Materiality and Enregistered Discoursementioning

confidence: 97%

Enregistering cuteness of fashion clothes on Chinese social media

2021

Journal of Material Culture

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In the context of cute material culture, this article focuses on the production of valorized cute aesthetic in fashion clothes being sold on Chinese social media. Through corpus-enlightened empirical case studies, the article demonstrates how the baby-talk register converges with the material design and embodiment of clothes to synergically affect the cute materiality of the clothes at issue. With special attention paid to discursive practices of enregisterment, the study tries to recalibrate the existing biased hermeneutics of cute material culture that largely reduce cute clothes to material immediacy and consumerist passivity. The study sheds light on the collegiality and complementarity that enregisterment shows for embodiment and material design in the production of material aesthetics, and by doing so enriches the understanding of materiality within clothing material culture in general.

show abstract

Section: Cute Clothes: Materiality and Enregistered Discoursementioning

confidence: 97%

Enregistering cuteness of fashion clothes on Chinese social media

2021

Journal of Material Culture

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Based on previous knowledge about kawaii engineering [18,19], each student selected an attribute to vary in order to make one robot in the pair more kawaii than the other robot. For example, in Figure 5, the left robot has a rounder shape, smaller head, or was more animal-like compared to the robot on the right in each robot pair, which is based on the results of our previous work [4,18,19]. These robots perform roles including cleaning floors and providing information on demand.…”

Section: Development Of a Virtual Space And Robot Pairsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Design and Implementation of Kawaii Robotic Gadgets in Virtual Spaces by Japanese and American University Students in a Remote Collaboration Project

Ohkura

Sugaya

Sripian

et al. 2022

IJAE

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper describes our educational project using remote collaboration related to the design and implementation of virtual Kawaii robots and spaces by Japanese and American university students. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we had to change our planned 7-week collaboration from in-person to virtual with a resultant change in the target product of our collaboration from real robots to virtual robots. Based on our new plan, students designed virtual spaces with robot pairs, proposed evaluation items for the robot pairs, evaluated their designs, and analyzed the results. The students designed each robot pair with the goal that one robot would be more kawaii and the other would be less kawaii due to a variation in a single attribute such as shape or color. The evaluation instrument used adjective pairs that were suitable to evaluate the affective values of the robot pairs and the virtual spaces the robots occupied. Through the design experience, students learned a lot about Kawaii Engineering and affective evaluation, which gave them a deeper understanding of Japanese culture from the viewpoint of Kansei/Affective Engineering. It is shown that understanding the role of "kawaii" for robotic gadget design is possible for students with various cultural background even under the virtual environment by employing our educational approach. This is a useful example of remote collaboration for education on Kansei Engineering. This paper is extended from the manuscript in the proceedings of ISASE 2021.

show abstract

“…Figure 2 shows the completed virtual spaces with example robot pairs. Based on previous knowledge about kawaii engineering [7,8], each student selected an attribute to vary in order to make one robot in the pair more kawaii than the other robot. For example, in Figure 3 the right robot has a rounder head and more cylindric body compared with the robot on the left because previous work shows that rounder objects are generally perceived to be more kawaii.…”

Section: Development Of a Virtual Space And Robot Pairsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Design and Implementation of Kawaii Robots by Japanese and American University Students using Remote Collaboration

Ohkura

Sugaya

Sripian

et al. 2021

ISASE

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper describes our approach to the design and implementation of virtual Kawaii robots and spaces by Japanese and American university students using remote collaboration. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we had to change our planned 7-week collaboration from in-person to virtual with a resultant change in the target product of our collaboration from real robots to virtual robots. Based on our new plan, students designed virtual spaces with robot pairs, proposed evaluation items for the robot pairs, evaluated their designs, and analyzed the results. The students designed each robot pair with the goal that one robot would be more kawaii and the other would be less kawaii due to a variation in a single attribute such as shape or color. The evaluation instrument used adjective pairs that were suitable to evaluate the affective values of the robot pairs and the virtual spaces the robots occupied. Through the design experience, students learned a lot about Kawaii Engineering and affective evaluation, which gave them a deeper understanding of Japanese culture from the viewpoint of Kansei/Affective Engineering.

show abstract

Kawaii Rules: Increasing Affective Value of Industrial Products

Cited by 20 publications

References 2 publications

Enregistering cuteness of fashion clothes on Chinese social media

Enregistering cuteness of fashion clothes on Chinese social media

Design and Implementation of Kawaii Robotic Gadgets in Virtual Spaces by Japanese and American University Students in a Remote Collaboration Project

Design and Implementation of Kawaii Robots by Japanese and American University Students using Remote Collaboration

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About