Pierre Lévy

• Professor
• Professor (Full) at National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts

For over three decades, kansei engineering has expanded greatly and has become a significant discipline both in the industrial and the academic worlds. In this paper, I present the current situation of kansei engineering, and plead for the emancipation of other disciplines, as part of kansei research as well. By reconstructing the historical path o...

HCI researchers offer an alternative way of interaction inspired by phenomenology. Through designing, they explore and propose possible tomorrows, placing meaning and beauty in interaction at the core of their approach. They perceive the world in terms of what we can do with it, and by physically interacting with it they access and express this mea...

Our lives are a collection of rituals. The way we wake up, the way we leave or enter our home are two of the many rituals each of us have constructed, and they structure our everyday lives. However, designing rituals remains challenging because of the nested structures of events within a ritual (temporal complexity) and the required consistency bet...

In this paper, we inquire aesthetical aspects of the Japanese tea ceremony, described as the aesthetics in the imperfection, based on novel fabrication technologies: 3D-modeling and 3D-printing. To do so, 3D-printed utensils (chashaku and chasen) were iteratively designed for the ceremony and were evaluated using constructivist interviews, elicitin...

The field of kansei studies is intrinsically a multi-disciplinary field of study, centred on the notion of kansei. This quality of the field generates both a richness for the kansei disciplines, and a challenge to define its core term, kansei. Taking into consideration this richness and this challenge, I propose an original way to look at kansei st...

The beginnings of a new European Renaissance can be felt in many places, including the Swedish city of Umeå, where a new Smart Bus Station was realised. This ‘Station of Being’ aimed at transforming today’s practices and exploring new sustainable futures based on values such as beauty and diversity. In this chapter, we describe ‘Station of Being’,...

Our current education systems do not adequately support students to learn how to deal with complex challenges and to create together alternative practices aimed at sustainable futures. We have developed a design approach and repository for transforming practices (TP) in order to engage with the world in co-response-able ways. During the past 20 yea...

This collection of infographics is a visual journey through the development, the application, and the communication of our approach in designing for transforming practices. This is a collection of perspectives: how do we view and shape societal transformation through a dialogue across different standpoints? While the work is grounded in design rese...

Despite the great potential of data platforms to help solve societal issues, the actual usage of data platforms is still limited due to the lack of consideration of socio-technical aspects. To understand requirements from multiple actors on a vitality data platform, semi-structured interviews were conducted with three groups of actors: representati...

Transforming practices (TP) aims to foster alternative practices for human development and societal resilience. We do so by designing and evaluating in complex socio-technical systems. The multitude of societal challenges we face are the signals of a need for a new paradigm. As per Gardien et al. (2014), "[with] processes, methods, tools and compet...

We follow up on a prominent line of work in which principles of embodied cognition are employed to not only account for skilled coping but also for more intellectual activities such as remembering and imagination. Imagination then, is not a reflective activity an individual does by herself, but a shared and embodied activity scaffolded by tangible...

We see a growing interest in sharing data and a growing desire to give meaning and understanding to data. Data sharing has great potential to promote people’s health and vitality by encouraging collaboration across a variety of parties. Nevertheless, the use of data lags behind due to the lack of consideration of various users’ requirements in desi...

We investigate the use of five postphenomenological concepts by bringing them to design practice and using them as a "generative lens" in design research. The use of these concepts in design research creates tension between the general and the particular. In a constructive design research process, we resolve this tension. We follow two complementar...

A shared goal set by many local governments is to stimulate physical activity in neighborhoods. Public playgrounds play an important role in governmental policies for promoting physical activity. Although these playgrounds are generally considered beneficial for participation in physical activity, detailed data on their use is lacking. As a result,...

This book gathers a selection of refereed papers presented at the 8th International Conference on Kansei Engineering and Emotion Research 2020 (KEER 2020), which was held in Tokyo, Japan, 7–9 September 2020. The contributions address the latest advances in and innovative applications of Kansei Engineering and Emotion Research and related topics. Th...

The concept of 'everyday' is a central topic in design, and this paper argues for more attention and discussion on the everyday than what is currently done in design research. By elaborating what the everyday is, designers can better formulate a perspective on people’s lives and experiences, and therefore can better contribute to the enchantment of...

Society is affected by the consequences of data collection, and there are trends visible in law, the public debate and technology that could make a privacy-conscious future possible. We study how to avoid data collection from the perspective and the role of design, to provide a starting point for new developments in this context. We do so by presen...

Current times call for addressing a variety of societal challenges, such as bridging social divides, making communities safe and sustainable, and ensuring healthy and fulfilling lives. There is a need for new paradigms, i.e. new shared beliefs, values, models and exemplars to guide a community of practitioners and theorists (Kuhn, 1970), that suppo...

Current times call for addressing a variety of societal challenges, such as bridging social divides, making communities safe and sustainable, and ensuring healthy and fulfilling lives. There is a need for new paradigms, i.e. new shared beliefs, values, models and exemplars to guide a community of practitioners and theorists (Kuhn, 1970), that suppo...

The Brabant Outcomes Fund (BOF) is an initiative by the Provence of North Brabant to fund entrepreneurs who contribute to a better society. by balancing people, profit and planet. In this collection of pictorials, TU/e students developed and tested 10 design interventions to support the Brabant Outcome Fund.

The scope of technology has expanded towards areas such as sports and vitality, offering significant challenges for engineering designers. However, only little is known about the underlying design and engineering processes used within these fields. Therefore, this paper aims to get an in-depth understanding of these type of processes. During a thre...

The proceedings gather a selection of refereed papers presented at the 7th International Conference on Kansei Engineering and Emotion Research 2018 (KEER 2018), which was held in Kuching, Malaysia from 19 to 22 March 2018. The contributions address the latest advances in and innovative applications of Kansei Engineering and Emotion Research. The s...

In this paper we share a theoretical perspective of co-responsibility, developed by a consortium of a university, a private company and a hospital. On this perspective we will base design interventions towards improving the experience and specifically the engagement of cardiovascular patients after the disease has occurred, a phase referred to as s...

Technological advances increase the possibilities for the aesthetics of interaction and the user experience. This is a growing field in the Human-Computer Interaction community (HCI). However, Lenz et al. [3] show that little is known about the relation between experiences and interaction. The current study explores this relation through the design...

While user interfaces for in-vehicle systems in the market are mostly button- and screen-based, advances in electronic technology provide designers with new design opportunities. In this paper, we propose applications of these novel technologies for several aspects of the current and future driving context. We explore opportunities for gesture-base...

The project presented in this paper is part of a broader research addressing in-between spaces and the designing of experiences taking place there. The project focuses on door frames, and inquires the way to improve social interactions taking place 'at the door'. To do so, the approach is structured on an Experiential Design Landscape in order to c...

This paper is an adaptation of the one published at KEER14. Despite the relative youth of kansei design as a discipline, compared to kansei engineering, different approaches can already be pointed out. Non-surprisingly, similar differences seem to be observed in the field of tangible interaction design as well. This similarity seems to be due to th...

This research project is called Rite de transition. By means of DesignChoreography, an approach developed by Sietske Klooster, we explore the rituals revolving around traditional Turkish marriage. In due course, inspired by an emotional and auto-ethnographic interpretation of the explored rituals, Klooster designs a novel ritual and artefact that i...

Approaches to create artifacts taking kansei into consideration are multiple and are shared among various disciplines, such as kansei engineering, kansei science, and kansei design. In this paper, I focus on the discipline of kansei design and show that various approaches exist within this discipline. These can be characterized based on their focus...

Next to the well-developed and recognized kansei engineering and kansei science, the discipline of kansei design still appears as emerging and explorative. In this paper, after presenting succinctly the theoretical basis of the first two disciplines, I compare them with and focus more in detail on the bases of kansei design, along with an inspirati...

Since 2006, Design Thinking education programs for master-level students have been developed at Ponts ParisTech, a leading French engineering school. This paper presents a longitudinal study of the creation and dissemination of Design Thinking (DT) as a discipline to educate top-level French students for innovation. From 2006 to 2012, 53 projects w...

Perceptual crossing is the reciprocal interplay of perceiving while being perceived. In this paper we discuss the last iteration of our ongoing research project on designing for perceptive qualities in systems of interactive products. We describe the design of explorative behavior in an artifact to enable the artifact and a person to engage in perc...

In this paper we describe our research on how to design for perceptual crossing between person and artefact. We present the design-research process, the design and evaluation of the designed artefact PeP+, short for perception pillar plus, and the generated design relevant knowledge. In our previous research we formulated a number of design notions...

In this paper we describe seven showcases, namely ‘BeTouched’, ‘Dawe & Valle’, ‘Wondertuf’, ‘IN2WACO’, ‘Blow!’, ‘ShyLight’ and ‘PeR’, that give relevant insights on how to design for perceptive qualities in artifacts. Designing these perceptive qualities hypothetically enables a person to engage in a reciprocal perceptive interplay with the artifac...

This research proposes to explore the consequences of a phenomenological approach on designing for the aesthetics of interaction. Highly complex products in a 'digital' world, enlisting complex functions, hierarchies, system architectures, procedures and so on, are designed to be used by humans. We approach designing intelligent systems, products a...

In this paper, we introduce a Research through Design on ‘Sensual Dynamics’, and explore four design projects (namely Be Touched!, Sound Flowers, Shylight, and Blow!) from which we extract design notions providing valuable insights on how to design with and for the senses’ quality ‘reciprocity’. ‘Sensual Dynamics’ designs are artifacts that are abl...

Designers face the world’s complexity at an experiential level. We consider Making (synthesising and concretising) an essential activity of designers, prior to Thinking (analysing and abstracting), because only through experience – a result of acting in the world – we achieve meaning, funnelling human intentionality. Making enables designers to exp...

This paper introduces a design method using psychophysiological research output as an inspiration means for the design of products taking user's Kansei highly into consideration. The development of this method is itself a part of a series of design methods based on the collaboration of the research fields of psychophysiology and design. As case stu...

The Industrial Design Department of Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) is continuously developing and putting in practice a holistic and integrative educational approach, focusing on designing intelligent systems, products, and related services for societal transformation. This approach requires students to continuously reflect upon their de...

In order to describe emerging methods and means for Kansei design, this chapter overviews three approaches involving an intense collaboration between the fields of design and psychophysiology: The use of tools built for psychophysiology and of techniques based on constructivist psychology theory, in order to support designers’ inspirational work fo...

Among other explorations, the field of telepresence technology has looked at ways to create a feeling of telepresence based on the transfer of minimal information. On this topic, the Cololo project has taken an extreme position by proposing the experience of 1-bit communication. Based on the observation of Cololo in use, it is shown that content is...

Approaches in interaction design were explored a hyperspace that human cognitive actions and interactive system in both two end. Recently, this dualism in diverse direction is integrated in a notion of context, which had brought from social science as the manifest of implicit interactions that makes "sense" from human actions or activities. In this...

Culture is typically approached in the field of design through generic, cross-domain constructs. In this paper we provide an alternative methodological approach to exploring cross-cultural differences by studying the idiosyncratic views of individuals with regard to existing products. We operationalize this approach through the Repertory Grid Techn...

This paper introduces a Kansei design method using psychophysiological research output as an inspiration means for the design of products taking highly into consideration user's Kansei. The development of this method is itself a part of a series of design method creation based on the collaboration of the research fields of psychophysiology and desi...

Creativity has been proposed to be either the result of solely right hemisphere processes or of interhemispheric interactions. Little information is available, however, concerning the neuronal foundations of creativity. In this study, we introduced a new artistic task, designing a new tool (a pen), which let us quantitatively evaluate creativity by...

MATiK is a Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) system for interdisciplinary workgroups. Its core function, the jump-analyser, enables to recreate the 'cocktail party phenomenon', viewed as an information social flow optimiser. Justified by MATiK's original design method, the criterion weights used for the switch evaluation were proposed to be qua...

The aim of this paper is to present the project undertaken by the authors to describe Kansei and to structure Kansei design studies. Indeed, the current fuzziness on Kansei research structure complicates the global comprehension of this field and seems to be a hindrance to Kansei design education and internationalization. To improve both of these a...

This paper introduces an interdisciplinary design method, based on psychophysiological knowledge used as inspirational means for Kansei design. After describing the interest for such method, this paper describes each step of the method, from pre-ideation steps to actual design process based on the knowledge of human behavior phenomena and of their...

Through the example of three projects, this paper describes emerging methods and means used in the field of Kansei design studies: - The use of tools built for psychophysiology and for constructive psychology in order to support designers’ work focusing on human beings’ behaviours and mental schemes; - The use of knowledge created by psychophysiolo...

Within the last thirty years, Kansei studies have become an important field of research in Japan. More recently, foreign researchers have become more and more interested in understating the approach, despite the difficulties related to the cultural dimension of Kansei and Kansei studies. The aim of this research is to propose to westerners a clear...

This research focuses on the engagement in service design. It aims at understanding how users appreciate or not their own engagement in the service process. As a case study for the experiment, various ways of “making tea” were used, and were presented to the subject. Based on the repertory grid method and the means-end chain technique, subjects’ pr...

The aim of this paper is to present the project undertaken by the authors to describe Kansei and to structure Kansei design studies. Indeed, the current fuzziness on Kansei research structure complicates the global comprehension of this field and seems to be a hindrance to Kansei design education and internationalization. To improve both of these a...

In recently, we designers aimed at discovering new domain of service and product to find the opportunities in order to create users need or demands in their daily life. However, the guidelines are still neglect for us to process design thinking for solution output. In the first part of this paper, the notion of service-embedded product (SeP) will b...

Objective of this research is to clarify crucial competences for designers who design service and competences that education institutes should develop for future service designers. To refer about Service Design, firstly, it is necessary to clarify each of two concepts, design and service, that both are elusive. In this research, design is treated a...

The aim of this article is to explore the suitability of psycho-physiological measures and psychological explorations for approaching user subjective experience. For this purpose the 2-point Electroencephalogram (EEG) comfort measurement is used to gather real-time information about how a person feels during the interaction with a product and the R...

Kansei design methods are successful in the Japanese industry and academic worlds. Outside Japan, their level of development and recognition is nothing compared with the situation inside of Japan. One of the reasons is that there is currently no comprehensive description of Kansei and Kansei studies written for the international community. This pap...

This paper presents an interdisciplinary design method and shows its relevance for EcoDesign. Interdisciplinary design intends to design a product considering its entire context, by the participation of various disciplines. A metaphorical level is required and built in the design process in order to involve properly all disciplines. This continuous...

The Kansei design method allows interdisciplinary workgroups to process design projects using an original knowledge sharing system. This system is based on the SECI Model, already recognized as one of the most efficient models for creative projects. To minimize knowledge distortions due to the interdisciplinary quality of the workgroup, a tool call...

Thesis (Ph. D. in Kansei Science)--University of Tsukuba, (A), no. 4050, 2006.3.24 Includes bibliographical references Thesis advisor: Toshimasa Yamanaka

In this paper, we introduce the work-in-progress of the design a CMC (Computer-Mediated Communication) system called MATiK. The originality of this design is not only the result, i.e. MATiK, but also the Kansei Information based design methodology used to design it. The later uses intuition as a knowledge-sharing process among the design workgroup...

The artifact is a complex element. Besides its elementary dimensions (material, functional and formal), the artifact is composed of much more dimensions: ergonomic, emotional, cultural, and even ethologic or theological. To take into account this great quantity and diversity of dimensions, the designer's work has to be widened out. Necessarily, thi...

Even though IT is a very convenient tool for virtual communities to correspond, limitations are many and, for most of them, already known. This paper focuses on the issues related with tacit knowledge and subjective communication. The aim is to introduce an original software taking user’s subjectivity into account to optimize information flow. This...

Even though IT is a very convenient tool for virtual communities to correspond, limitations are many and, for most of them, already known. This paper focuses on the issues related with tacit knowledge and subjective communication. The aim is to introduce an original software taking user’s subjectivity into account to optimize information flow. This...

The product is a complex element. In addition to its material, formal and functional dimensions, products are based on many other dimensions, which are of a sensory, emotional, cultural, historic (and so on) nature. Product design unceasingly tries to design products by taking into account of their complexity and thus of a maximum of these dimensio...

The industry of product conception mainly involves decision makers from the fields of marketing, design and engineering. In this study, the perception of the information through this process that influences the decision makers was analyzed through a survey riding on a Kansei approach. This approach emphasizes the influence of the professionals’ per...