A Target-Based Decision-Making Approach to Consumer-Oriented Evaluation Model for Japanese Traditional Crafts

Abstract

This paper deals with the evaluation of Japanese traditional crafts, in which product items are assessed according to the so-called “Kansei” features by means of the semantic differential method. For traditional crafts, decisions on which items to buy or use are usually influenced by personal feelings/characteristics; therefore, we shall propose a consumer-oriented evaluation model targeting these specific requests by consumers. Particularly, given a consumer's request, the proposed model aims to define an evaluation function that quantifies how well a product item meets the consumer's feeling preferences. An application to evaluating patterns of Kutani porcelain is conducted to illustrate how the proposed evaluation model works, in practice.