Emotion and Multi-Dimensional Engineering

Yesterday, we believed the future is ours to see, but it becomes increasingly difficult with frequent and extensive changes to predict the future. But on the other side, as Internet of Things indicates, people and even things are getting more and more connected, and enormous amount of information is flying around the world. Therefore, now is the time for a change. We have to create the future. Engineering is a creative activity to make our dreams come true. We have to get back to the starting point of engineering. In order to make the future ours to create, we have to add contextual meaning to the information. It is a very important role of emotion. As brain science indicates, the prefrontal region of our brain is deeply related to perception, cognition and emotion. It made clear its executive function is closely related to emotion, which processes crosstemporal and cross-modal information, and it relates our past to the future. Thus, emotion must be explored from multi-dimensional aspects. If we do not understand the situation in our daily life, we exert a full range of senses. In the same way, we have to integrate all information by utilizing emotion to make a proper step forward. Eight papers in this special issue are from various fields and provide very different perspectives. Therefore, it is strongly hoped that the reader will find a clue to how they can connect them, and bridge the gap between different fields in order to explore the new world and to create the future. The first paper, titled “The next stage of engineering: from How and What to Why” by Shuichi Fukuda is a position paper, or it would be better to call it an engineering essay. Engineering is a creative activity to make our dreams come true. That is why we are called Homo Faber (Human makes a tool). We designed and made a tool to realize our dreams. But once we succeeded in making a tool, we forgot our dreams and we devoted ourselves entirely to search for what we can develop with it. Thus, engineering up to now has focused on How and then What. But now we are getting back to the starting point. Why do we want such a product or service? What differentiates humans from animals is that humans can think about the future. So the next stage of engineering is getting away from the animal world and exploring the new world of humans. The second paper, titled “Unfolding the notion of experience (virtual) prototyping: a framework for prototyping in an experience-driven design process” by Serena Camere and Monica Bordegoni proposes Experience Prototyping. Prototyping has developed from verification to validation. Innovation in (virtual) technology has enabled prototyping the future users’ experience, in order to respond to the increasing importance of experience value. Thus, prototyping has opened a door to the new world of experience development.