Affective Laboratory

It has been widely believed, and actually practiced, that decision-making in management should be done in principle based on objective measurements such as sales, costs, benefits, and efficiency. In recent years, however, there emerged a new idea that such numerical indices may not be sufficient as a basis of decision. For example, if a company wants to develop a new product that evokes deep affective experiences among users, it is necessary to deliberately build high design, quality materials, skilled finish and tuned movement into the product, usually resulting in additional costs. If the management board emphasized reduction of costs, these elaborations of quality might be replaced with easier and cheaper ways. On the other hand, if the management board recognized that the affective experiences these qualities might bring to users would add much value to the product, these elaborations would never be the target of cost-reduction, and could even be given higher priorities.

The example above illustrates the difference in affectiveness of management, or whether the management takes into considerations “what affect this decision may result in customer’s mind,” and if it gives higher priority to this value system. In other words, a management may clearly recognize the importance of factors that appeal to people’s emotion such as aesthetics and pleasure, give higher priority to them, and do not allow sacrificing them. Such management that emphasize the criteria that “if this decision affective or not” in addition to the conventional numerical indices may be called as affective management.

The concept of affective management is neither neglecting nor thinking little of conventional numerical and rational indices. This concept is to value affectiveness equally to them. In practice, however, it is very difficult to provide common numerical measure of affectiveness that can be directly compared with the conventional numerical indices. As shown in the example above, it is not easy to convert affectiveness into money amount. If there were already precedent products of competitors in the market, such as the case of luxury automobiles, it may be possible to estimate the money amount of affective quality value of your product that is planned to get into the market from now on. However, the more innovative the new product is, the harder it is to estimate its affective value in advance. In order to promote the concept of affective management, it is urgently needed to research and develop these quantitative measurements of affectiveness.

It is not limited to affects of customers that management board has to deliberate. For all stakeholders including shareholders, employers, business partners, and society, managements need to consider on what affective experience their managerial decisions may give those people, what affective experience they should provide, and what priority they should give to these issues comparing with other criteria. This is not a very new idea. A number of excellent managements in our country have known, based on their sensibility and experiences, what affective effect of their decisions and behaviors might have on whom, and whether they should dare to do them or not. However, in many times this skill existed as implicit knowledge of excellent managements, and never be one everyone can own. Affective management is one of the important values that have firmly existed among Japanese managements, which have not been explicitly claimed and thus might have remained in the shadows of “rational” decision making.

source: Umemuro, H. (2009). Affective technology, affective management, towards affective society. Proceedings of The 13th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI International 2009).