Japanese HCI Symposium: Japanese Culture and Kansei

Psychologically, "Kansei" is related to emotion and cognition and sociologically is related to culture and tradition. Historically, as a Japanese term, the origin of the concept of "Kansei" goes back to "Aesthesis" by Aristotle and "Aesthetics" concepts by Baumgarten and Kant. When this concept was imported to Japan in Meiji era, about 150 years ago, the concept was translated as "Bigaku" or the science of beauty as well as was translated as "Kansei" or the concept with the connotation including sensitivity, sensibility, emotion and feeling. Hence Kansei is related to the science of beauty in its historical background in Japan. JSKE (Japan Society of Kansei Engineering) started a series of KEER (Kansei Engineering and Emotion Research) conference in the latter sense of aesthetics. This is a peculiar situation of the Japanese language and its academic culture. Similarly, The term "Kansei" can be interpreted differently from country to country, and from culture to culture. This workshop is organized to discuss the concept of "Kansei" from different cultural perspectives. For example, "kawaii" is now used internationally as can be found in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kawaii). At the same time, this workshop aims not only to differentiate the differences among various cultures, but also expects to find out the common aspects based on the fact that we are all the human beings with the emotional system and the cognitive system.