Before they buy textile materials for serial production designers and manufacturers order samples or visit textile exhibitions and fairs. Materials can also be selected from catalogues and through the web, where only technical specifications are given in addition to the photographs. In order to facilitate material selection a data system is needed which, in addition to the physical and chemical properties of the textiles would also provide a description of their sensory properties. We detect these properties with our basic senses. We have five basic sense organs: the eye, the ear, the nose, the tongue, and the skin. In our research we focused on the feel/touch sense. In connection to the sense of feeling in textiles we have terms like »hand feel«, »fabric hand« or »hand of a fabric«. These terms refer to the description of the sensation how the textile feels in contact to the skin for which there are many expressions. In Japan these words are called kansei words. There the integration of feelings into the development of new products is well established. Such design of products is called emotional design which also includes the method of kansei engineering on which the master's thesis is based. Kansei is a Japanese word which translates as sensitivity, feeling, and emotion. Most often the word is used as it is. In the master's thesis we focused on using the kansei engineering method to obtain the sensory properties of knitted fabrics. In the first phase of the research we collected and selected the kansei words for knitted fabrics from various sources. In the second phase, on the basis of the sensory properties testing, the most descriptive kansei words were attributed to individual knitted fabrics and presented in a table. In the same way and for each knitted fabric the description obtained by the kansei engineering method should be added to other technical data in the technical documentation and/or in the catalogue.
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