Human-Product Communication - Emotional Engineering - page 10

Fig. 1 Open loop system
Fig. 2 Closed loop system
people's dreams and increasingly important role of engineering now is to make their
dreams come true, rather than to meet their needs for today.
In fact, this is what engineering is for. Why humans are called Homo Faber? We
make tools to realize our dreams. Engineering started to make our dreams come
true. But with the progress of technology, we are stuck with the technological tools
and we forgot this starting point and we are now focusing our attention to produce
better products, forgetting why we developed such technologies. This will be dis-
cussed from another viewpoint in Chap. “ Human Centered Industry ”.
But to understand what a customer is dreaming about is very dif ! cult. Our
traditional engineering is one way, from producer to user and it is an open-loop
system (Fig. 1 ) . Producers have their models of production and their models are
! fixed. What producers are paying attention to is to how effectively they can work on
this model.
In order to understand the dreams of customers, producers have to understand
what a customer is thinking and how he or she is living. Producers need continuous
feedback from their customers. Thus, engineering tomorrow will be a closed-loop
system and how we can get feedback from our customers become crucially
important (Fig. 2 ) .
To achieve this goal, a product has to sense what a user is expecting and how he
or she is using it. To sense appropriately, a product has to communicate with a user
all the time. Communication is not only important for producers, but also for users,
too. As situations change very frequently and extensively, users have to make an
adequate judgment all the time. To do it, they need adequate information. Products
that can communicate with users can provide such information necessary for users.
This chapter describes the importance of communication and how products and
users can communicate will be discussed.