The significance of form elements: a study of representational content of design sketches

The purpose of this paper is to understand the significance of form elements through the interpretations of design sketches. These interpretations are provided by designers themselves interpreting expressive characteristics of car images, and by students interpreting the sketches of designers' morphing sequences. In the experimental investigation of the sketching process through morphing sequence exercises, designers used individually driven styles and approaches when creating product form. These approaches produce characteristically different form ideas, which differ (but also show consistency) with respect to type of car category, expression, identity, recognition, format, composition, complexity, etc. Typically, assessment of generated sketch work and ideas is done using relative heuristic evaluation in a comparative design review. Given a large set of automotive sketches, general patterns of styling emphasis can be identified. The paper concludes that perceptions of designers are varied due to the representation format of the ideas as visual hand sketches. The visual hand sketches point out certain meaning and can be categorized with respect to perceptual characteristics according to the PPE framework and suggest that a tool to support evaluation and generation of early design concepts can be developed, and to support the generation of form ideas with desired characteristics for a brand, product category and market.

[1]  Andre Liem,et al.  UNDERSTANDING STYLING ACTIVITY OF AUTOMOTIVE DESIGNERS: A STUDY OF MANUAL INTERPOLATIVE MORPHING THROUGH FREEHAND SKETCHING , 2011 .

[2]  Klaus Krippendorff,et al.  Product Semantics: Exploring the Symbolic Qualities of Form , 1984 .

[3]  Nathan Crilly.  Product aesthetics: representing designer intent and consumer response , 2005 .

[4]  Karl T. Ulrich,et al.  50th Anniversary Article: Technological Innovation, Product Development, and Entrepreneurship in Management Science , 2004, Manag. Sci..

[5]  Robert Newman,et al.  Sketching, concept development and automotive design , 2003 .

[6]  Bernard Cova,et al.  Societal innovations and the postmodern aestheticization of everyday life , 1993 .

[7]  Toni-Matti Karjalainen,et al.  Educational Approaches to Designing for Visual Brand Recognition , 2007 .

[8]  William B. Dodds,et al.  the Effect of Brand and Price Information on Subjective Product Evaluations , 1985 .

[9]  Gerhard Heufler.  Design Basics: From Ideas to Products , 2004 .

[10]  Zhigang Deng,et al.  Computer Facial Animation: A Survey , 2008 .

[11]  Anders Warell,et al.  Modelling perceptual product experience – Towards a cohesive framework of presentation and representation in design , 2008 .

[12]  Richard E. Parent,et al.  Shape averaging and its applications to industrial design , 1989, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications.

[13]  Brigitte Borja de Mozota,et al.  The Impact of User‐Oriented Design on New Product Development: An Examination of Fundamental Relationships* , 2005 .

[14]  L. Sanders,et al.  A Social Vision for Value Co-creation in Design , 2009 .

[15]  D. Norman.  Emotional design : why we love (or hate) everyday things , 2004 .

[16]  K. Eisenhardt,et al.  PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT: PAST RESEARCH, PRESENT FINDINGS, AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS , 1995 .

[17]  P. Clarkson,et al.  Seeing things: consumer response to the visual domain in product design , 2004 .

[18]  Vincent Cheutet,et al.  3D sketching for aesthetic design using fully free-form deformation features , 2005, Comput. Graph..

[19]  Suzan Boztepe,et al.  User Value: Competing Theories and Models , 2007 .

[20]  Anders Warell,et al.  Visual product identity: Understanding identity perceptions conveyed by visual product design. , 2006 .

[21]  Anders Warell.  Design Syntactics: A Functional Approach to Visual Product Form – Theory, Models, and Methods , 2001 .

[22]  Sharon Poggenpohl,et al.  User-Centered Innovation: The Interplay between User-Research and Design Innovation , 2002 .

[23]  Jonathan Cagan,et al.  Creating Breakthrough Products: Innovation from Product Planning to Program Approval , 2001 .

[24]  R. Mauborgne,et al.  Blue Ocean Strategy: From Theory to Practice , 2005 .

[25]  T.L.J. Ferris,et al.  User-Centered Design: An Integrated Approach , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication.

[26]  Herbert A. Simon.  Alternative representations for cognition: Search and reasoning. , 1992 .

[27]  Scott Isensee,et al.  User-Centered Design: An Integrated Approach with Cdrom , 2001 .

[28]  D. Chandler.  Semiotics For Beginners , 2011 .

[29]  P. Desmet,et al.  Framework of product experience , 2007 .

[30]  Anders Warell.  Identity Recognition in Product Design: An Approach for Design Management , 2006 .