Fuben-Eki: Japanese for “Benefit of Inconvenience” that Illustrates a New Value Orthogonal to Efficiency and Functionality

Abstract

Fuben-eki is Japanese. Fuben means inconvenience and Eki means benefits. Fuben-eki means benefits that are gained only by inconvenience. Pursuing benefits employing not convenience but inconvenience sounds like one of the old Buddhist teachings, but in fact, it is relatively new. Providing Fuben-eki to users is one of the principles of system design, especially human–machine systems. This principle is effective in several design fields. They are not just confined to designing physical systems, e.g., product design but spread to service and business designs. As the general introduction of this book, this chapter introduced a definition of Fuben-eki (benefit of inconvenience: BoI) and discussed the common properties of design fields that are effective to introduce Fuben-eki. The property was elucidated as having a value axis orthogonal to efficiency and functionality. In the second half of this chapter, design fields were introduced. They contribute commentary and case studies to this book. The relationships between these fields and Fuben-eki were explained in short. They will help readers of this book to find an overlap between their interests and this book.