Pierre Lévy's Kansei Philosophy As Understood Through Human-Computer Interaction Theories

Abstract

French industrial designer Pierre Lévy has proposed a way to understand the philosophy behind kansei engineering. His account is perhaps the most detailed explanation of kansei philosophy in a langauge other than Japanese. Lévy's proposal draws on the ideas of twentieth century Kyoto School founder Kitarou Nishida – particularly Nishida's interest in phenomenology, and his concepts of action-intuition, pure experience, and basho Five particular elements of Lévy's explanation can be compared to fundamental concepts in theories from the discipline of human-computer interaction. These theories include, but are not limited to, Paul Dourish's embodied interaction, Pierre Rabardel's instrumental genesis, and Susanne BØdker's human-artifact model. Kansei philosophy is thereby characterizable with an entirely new vocabulary and analytical framework, arising from the human computer interaction literature. This new framework gives scholars in both Japanese and non-Japanese sociocultural settings a set of novel conceptual tools to understand kansei philosophy.