Approaching Product Subjective Sustainability: Comparative Analysis of the Lifecycle of Short-and Long-lived Products from the Viewpoint of ‘Kansei’ Engineering

• Published in: International journal of design management and professional practice Vol. 6; no. 1; pp. 1 - 32
• Main Authors: Zafarmand, Seyed Javad, Terauchi, Fumio, Aoki, Hiroyuki
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Rome Common Ground Research Networks 2013
• Subjects: Evolution; Handicrafts; Investigations; Life cycle analysis; Product life cycle; Sustainability
• ISSN: 2325-162X; 2325-1638
• DOI: 10.18848/2325-162X/CGP/v06i01/38603

The present work proposes the concept of Product Subjective Sustainability to indicate ‘the emotional, affective and/or aesthetical capability of a product to satisfyingly and pleasantly last during its expected long/short lifetime’. To clarify this concept analytically and to expand it experimentally, we have conducted an analytical study on the evolution of users’ Kansei toward their short/long-lived products throughout the entire lifecycles of their products. Kansei, in its professional definition, embraces a wider range of subjective issues of product than any other term like emotion. In this research, the product lifecycle from the user’s perspective is divided into three different stages: purchasing/choosing, keeping/using and replacing/throwing away the product. Mobile phone, private passenger car and handicraft are assigned as the short-lived and long-lived product cases for the investigation. Three groups of Iranian subjects, as the users or owner of these three kinds of products, are investigated and the changes of their Kansei toward their products are analyzed. The outcome of this analysis will be the Kansei factors, which have association with the investigated subjects’ rationale when purchasing, keeping/using and replacing/parting their short/long-lived products. Eventually, the patterns of Kansei evolution of these three groups over the lifecycle stages of their short/long-lived products are extracted and the resulting Kansei structures concerning the lifecycle stages are compared between the assigned products.