DETC / DTM-8752 THE ROLE OF SHAPE IN COMMUNICATING DESIGNERS ’ AESTHETIC INTENTS

Product designers want to evoke specific target customer responses. They communicate their aesthetic intents to target customers by means of the shape, composition and physical properties of the designed product. As a contribution in the development of a computer aided conceptual support system, we developed a theory of communication of aesthetic intents, with a formalism of a mapping between the space of shape characteristics and the space of aesthetic characteristics, describing how aesthetic intents can be related to the shape of a product. We used this as a starting point for empirical studies into respondents shape perception of products, and their appreciation of these products. We analyzed the results of these experiments and concluded that a first version of the mapping can be established. INTRODUCTION In pursuit of developing increasingly complex products for a global market, where competitive products deliver comparable functionality with balanced prices, the appearance of a product gets more and more emphasis. Aesthetic appreciation by target customers becomes an essential factor in the success of product development. When designing the appearance of a product, it is necessary to continuously evaluate consequences of changes in customer appreciation. When optimizing e.g. the manufacturability of the product, consequences of changes in appearance of the product should be considered. Despite the apparent need for continuous evaluation of target customers’ aesthetic appreciation, this discipline is only just beginning to develop. The most intriguing issue of this 'design for aesthetics' discipline is how to implement a translation or mapping between two universes: the space of aesthetic characteristics and the space of shape characteristics. The correspondence between elements (or groups of elements) of the two spaces is not straightforward. It can be apprehended only with the involvement of psychological aspects, as it is strongly influenced by cultural, personal, sociological, etc. factors. Designers cannot fully control customer responses, because there are certain aspects they cannot influence, e.g. the experience and mood of the person that will interact with their design. However, designers can influence –to a certain degree– the appreciation of a product, by altering its shape. Nevertheless, customer appreciation is a design aspect that has many facets, as recent publications of studies into shape/appreciation relations show. Hsiao and Wang [1998] have developed a way to relate shape changes to image changes. They report on their design model in which they use membership functions (cars having a certain image profile) and transformation rules, to generate alternatives. They apply transformations with a certain change in image as a result. The relation between car image and transformation rule is assessed using Multi Dimensional Scaling method. Yoshimura and Yanagi [1998] developed a method to integrate aesthetic factors with objective attributes in robot arm design to optimize costs, functionality and users' appreciation. Chen and Owen [1998] have developed a system to automatically apply a certain style to a product. Three styles are defined by a style profile, and this is related to the shape of product details by the authors. An automatic system can generate the shape details to give the product the intended style. These studies all investigate the relationship between shape –or transformations of shape– and appreciation, however they consider the shape to be objective, whereas the perception of the shape can be a very influential factor. In contrast to the aforementioned studies, our research combines the perceived hape of products and the expressed appreciation of those