Age of Subjective Engineering - Emotional Engineering - page 1

Age of Subjective Engineering
Shuichi Fukuda
Abstract Up to now, people have been looking for products because they brought
forth great convenience in their life. People thought the more functions were added,
the greater their QOL (Quality of Life) would become. In these times, engineers did
their best to produce better quality products with more functions. But ironically
enough, the more technology advances and the faster products can be produced, the
more people come to feel dissatis ! ed. Such remarkable progress changed people's
life and their life space became far wider and their lifestyle became very much
personalized. Addition of many functions in a short time did not bring satisfaction
to them, but on the contrary, it irritated them, because they could not master it in
such a short time. Thus, people's expectations come to be very much personalized
and they come to feel satis ! ed when their personal expectations are really met and
realized. To express such a change in another way, engineers have been trying to
achieve the best in objective evaluation, but people come to evaluate value in a
subjective way. Thus, it becomes increasingly important for engineers to satisfy
each customer's expectation rather than achieving the best in the objective sense.
Our engineering is, therefore, quickly moving from objective engineering to sub-
jective engineering.
1 Quality of Life
Quality of Life (QOL) is attracting wide attention these days as one of our very
important issues. It should be noted that QOL has now come to be discussed in
terms of Subjective well-being (SWB).
Although QOL has long been our most central concern, we have been discussing
well-being or happiness from the objective perspective or in economic terms
S. Fukuda ( & )
System Design and Management, Keio University, 4-4-1 Hiyoshi, Kohoku-ku,
Yokohama 223-8526, Japan
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