Kansei Engineering: Emotion Exploration in Blogs

The Kansei design method is gaining wide acceptance all around the world. Researchers have begun to address emotional elements in various domain of research to ensure product acceptability and feasibility. Kansei is known for its uniqueness as it varies from one domain to another. This paper explores the emotional responses relative to student´s blogs using the Kansei Engineering methodology. An evaluation of visitor´s kansei towards a collection of blogs was conducted using a pre-selected 13 student´s blogs and 12 human emotions derived from PrEmo, a kansei measurement tool. The research highlights the emotion structure in the blogs. Results of the research demonstrated that there are more positive emotion traits in the student´s blogs. However, it is noticed that emotions such as pride and joy are not explicitly reflected in the student´s blogs. Furthermore, boredom which is classified as a negative emotion topped the list for the mentioned category. Nevertheless, the findings also suggest that the top three positive emotions such as fascination, satisfaction and desire are highly rated for blogs categorized as Special Interest Blog Visual Information. Adding on, some blogs are not popular amongst the respondents from private higher education institution due to the Blog Visual Information (BVI) representation and other implicit factors related to the blogger as reflected in the Personalized BVI representation. Some implications of the findings are discussed in this paper.