A Probability-Based Approach to Consumer Oriented Evaluation of Traditional Craft Items Using Kansai Data

This paper deals with the evaluation problem of Japanese traditional crafts in which product items are evaluated according so-called kansei features by means of the semantic differential method. As for traditional crafts, decisions on which items to buy or use are usually influenced by personal feelings/characteristics, we shall propose a consumer-oriented evaluation model targeting on those recommendation requests specified by consumers. Particularly, given a consumer’s recommendation request, the proposed model aims at defining an evaluation function that quantifies how well a product item meets the consumer’s feeling preference. An application for evaluating patterns of Kutani porcelain is conducted to illustrate how the proposed evaluation model works practically.