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Dr Mike Burton, Senior Research Fellow - RMIT University
One of the Sports Edge projects is actually funded by Mizuno, a Japanese sports company
who produce mainly running shoes. The aim of this project was to look at the running
shoes that the company produces and try and develop a new concept
running shoe for a specific target user.
Patrick Clifton, PhD Student - RMIT University
Primarily there's quite a significant number of running clubs and associations
in Australia so initially we emailed those online invitations to their participants.
The survey has a specific structure for each performance attribute where they rate
the importance of the attribute, what they feel is the ideal level, what they want
to see in that running shoe.
Okiver Ladd, Marketing Manager - Mizuno Australia
One of the biggest challenges of running shoe manufacturers is discovering
what makes a person buy a running shoe. So this is a challenge that together
with RMIT we're hoping to solve.
So Kansei Engineering is effectively a design strategy and effectively
what it tries to do is identify the feelings and the emotional requirements
of a user and try and integrate that into the product.
So that's the tricky part, that's really where you've got to try and correlate the technical
attributes of running shoes, the standard design parameters.
How do we match those to our performance characteristics that we've got data from out
in the field and that's where the tricky engineering bit comes in,
it's a combination of statistics and laboratory tests and just trying to link those
relationships so that we can use our ideal levels of each of these performance
characteristics and then match that to a specific value of our technical
design parameters thus giving us, theoretically, the perfect running shoe.