Affective engineering involves measuring people's affective responses to products, identifying the features of the product to which people are responding, and then using the information to improve the design of the product. By affective response, we mean the way they feel about the product. This involves two activities. First, accurate measurements of people's affective engagement with products need to be measured and, second, the physical properties of the product and the mechanics of the interaction need to be characterised. First activity at Leeds in 2001 started from comments by industrial collaborators in the manufacturing arena that although efficient and high quality manufacture was certainly necessary, ensuring that manufactured products would be what people wanted to buy (in preference to competitors' products with the same functionality and usability) was becoming the bottleneck in new product introduction processes. Traditionally this was the area of industrial design, but perhaps a more systematic, engineering, approach would lead to an increased number of successful products. An engineering approach to subjective human-product interaction studies had been pioneered in Japan, starting from the 1970s. It is known there as kansei engineering. Affective engineering is a Western interpretation of Kansei engineering which has been pioneered by Nagamachi at Hiroshima University since the 1970s. At Leeds, we have been applying the principles of affective engineering to the tactile properties of product packaging, personal care and domestic cleaning products, and to touch-sensitive display screens.