Comparison of evaluation of kawaii ribbons between genders and generation of Japanese

“Kawaii” is a Japanese word that represents an emotional value; it has positive meanings, such as cute, lovable, and small. In the 21^st century, the emotional values of industrial products become very important. However, since not many studies have focused on the kawaii attributes, we focus on a systematic analysis of kawaii products themselves, that is kawaii feelings caused by the attributes such as shapes, colors, and materials. We have already performed some experiments for abstract objects in virtual environment and obtained some interesting tendencies on kawaii attributes such as kawaii shapes and kawaii colors. This article introduces our trial that dealt with combinations of attributes, including colors and patterns, and applied them to an actual product, a ribbon, using a web questionnaire system. From analysis of the questionnaire results, we compared the selection tendencies of kawaii ribbons by genders and generation of Japanese.