Exploring Semantic Space for Kawaii Design

Kawaii has drawn the attention of people both in and out of Japan. In order to investigate Kawaii semantics and find typical Kawaii design features, we conducted a survey of Kawaii semantics and an experiment to verify the findings of the survey. The survey finds Kawaii semantics from visual, acoustic, tactile, movement and emotional aspects. Explorative factor analysis is conducted to find typical factors and to establish a six-dimensional model of Kawaii semantics. The experiment is based on the survey and intends to examine the effects of Kawaii factors on Kawaii design of furniture, household appliances and robots. The results indicate that roundness is effective to make all three products Kawaii. Interaction effects between factors are significant, indicating that Kawaii is integrated but not simply aggregated by Kawaii features. Kawaii design guidelines are put forward from the results to improve design efficiency and improve user experience in Kawaii design in the future. This research for the first time fuses Kawaii features from multiple aspects and provides a structural foundation for further study of Kawaii design.