Best Fit Product - Emotional Engineering - page 33

11.2 Time Diversi ! cation: Diversi ! cation of Processes
Time diversi ! cation is closely related to customization. If we can make our
products easier to customize, then even if we produce our products in much smaller
variety, we could satisfy our customers more.
User Experience (UX) is getting wide attention these days. UX is nothing other
than customization.The same kind of product can generate different value through
different experience. That is what UX means. In fact, the word customer comes
from “customize”. Customers are not mere consumers. They would like to cus-
tomize our products to their needs and preferences [ 5 ] .
In other words, customization is nothing other than adaption. If our products
adapt to the needs and preference of our customers, they will certainly satisfy our
customers much more. To respond to time diversi ! cation, we must learn how we
can make our products adaptable and fl flexible enough to varying conditions.
However, few, if any, researchers work on how we can make our products adaptive
and fl flexible enough. This is because our engineering value is still based on ! nal
product at the time of delivery and we focus our main attention to whether our
products comply with the design requirements, not to the time-varying situational
requirements. Our engineering has been veri ! cation-oriented. We should change it
to validation-oriented. We should make more efforts to meet the real expectations of
our customers.
12 Degradation and Adaptation
When we talk about adaption, we should not forget that it is closely associated with
degradation. Let us take shoes for example. We feel awkward when we walk in new
shoes, because they do not ! fit us perfectly. But as we wear them, they break in and
adapt to our walking style and to our feet. Then, we enjoy walking.
Tremendous amount of research has been carried out on degradation such as
wear, fatigue, etc. But these studies are aimed mainly at how we can prevent them.
They were considered to be devaluating phenomena. This is because the value of a
product has been evaluated at the time of delivery and a product which meets the
design speci ! cations has been considered to be most satisfactory.
But if we look at our daily life, we would immediately realize that this is not
true. We enjoy using our products when they break in and come to ! fit us best in our
environments and under our situations. In other words, we enjoy using our products
when they adapt to our conditions. Shoes, for example, are such typical products in
our daily life. This holds true to all products. We should start pursuing how we can
control degradation so that we can maintain the feeling of best ! fit as long as
possible.
The shoes development by ASICS is very much associated with degradation. We
often assume the problem of degradation is a long-term phenomenon. But in the