Best Fit Product - Emotional Engineering - page 31

Photo 1 Example of ASICS shoes
Shoes provide us with a very good example for such satisfying communication.
ASICS, a Japanese footwear company, is focusing their attention on how they can
develop best ! fit shoes. The feeling of best ! fit varies from case to case.
For an athlete, the best ! fit means that he or she can win the race and the
durability does not matter. If they feel the shoes ! fit him or her best at the time of a
race, that's the “best”.
But for those who would like to enjoy walking in their daily life, the best ! fit feeling
must last long. How we can keep the feeling as long as possible is their concern.
ASIC found out that the worn out shoes shown in the middle in Photo 1 is the best
! fit one, because the middle section deforms fl flexibly as we walk. So they developed
shoes for walking with the middle section adaptive enough to the deformation of a
foot with other section being the same as the other regular shoes. These shoes were
sold very well, because people feel as if they are walking on their feet.
Interestingly enough, the same idea is applied to develop sports shoes, because at
the start, such deformation is needed. And this product was also a big success.
This example will be discussed in Chap. “ Human Centered Industry ” from
another viewpoint.
We have to note that in such cases, the quality does not have to be maintained at
the same level. Even if the quality degrades, we feel it ! fits us “best”, if it degrades
just the way we like. Engineer's challenge is how they can keep this best- ! t
condition as long as possible.
9 Degradation — Learning to Communicate Better
Engineers have considered degradation as a phenomenon to prevent. They have not
discussed how they can manage degradation and let our products degrade as we
like. They have never discussed how they can “tame” our products or let them get
older wisely. We should expect them to change our products from just functional
artifacts to emotional pets.