Abstract
Fierce competition in an increasingly fragmented market forces new products to be developed in rapid cycles for very specific groups of target customers. Automobiles, which used to spend five to seven years in development, are now developed in three to five years. For the highly competitive consumer electronics market, the situation is much worse: a mobile phone is often given merely three months for design and development. In many product categories, the market is flooded with numerous products that are almost indistinguishable in terms of functionality, quality, and usability. To stand out among such abundance of alternatives, a product must appeal to the emotional needs of the customers. Affective responses evoked by beautifully design product shapes are fundamental in addressing these emotional needs. In these competitive markets, designers face the constant challenge of developing products that convey specific affective meanings within extremely compressed development time. Existing computer-aided tools that assist designers only in drawing and modeling no longer suffice. New tools at the concept design stage are needed that allow designers to rapidly explore a large number of product shapes and evaluate their affective appeals. By combining image morphing techniques from computer graphics and perceptual mapping techniques from marketing and psychology research, we propose a set of visualization tools for exploring affective product shapes. To verify whether these morphing tools are useful in product design, we investigate the following two questions: 1 What is the relationship between interpolated shapes and the affective responses evoked by these shapes? As a product shape gradually changes from one extreme shape to the other, does the affective response change in predictive manner? 2 What is the best way for obtaining the interpolated shapes? Are the results from two-dimensional (2D) image morphing as good as the results from three- dimensional (3D) shape morphing?
Citation
Chen, L., Yeh, C., Wong, B., and Hsiao, K. (2004) Morphing as a Tool for Exploring Affective Product Shapes., in Redmond, J., Durling, D. and de Bono, A (eds.), Futureground - DRS International Conference 2004, 17-21 November, Melbourne, Australia. https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/drs-conference-papers/drs2004/researchpapers/174
Morphing as a Tool for Exploring Affective Product Shapes.
Fierce competition in an increasingly fragmented market forces new products to be developed in rapid cycles for very specific groups of target customers. Automobiles, which used to spend five to seven years in development, are now developed in three to five years. For the highly competitive consumer electronics market, the situation is much worse: a mobile phone is often given merely three months for design and development. In many product categories, the market is flooded with numerous products that are almost indistinguishable in terms of functionality, quality, and usability. To stand out among such abundance of alternatives, a product must appeal to the emotional needs of the customers. Affective responses evoked by beautifully design product shapes are fundamental in addressing these emotional needs. In these competitive markets, designers face the constant challenge of developing products that convey specific affective meanings within extremely compressed development time. Existing computer-aided tools that assist designers only in drawing and modeling no longer suffice. New tools at the concept design stage are needed that allow designers to rapidly explore a large number of product shapes and evaluate their affective appeals. By combining image morphing techniques from computer graphics and perceptual mapping techniques from marketing and psychology research, we propose a set of visualization tools for exploring affective product shapes. To verify whether these morphing tools are useful in product design, we investigate the following two questions: 1 What is the relationship between interpolated shapes and the affective responses evoked by these shapes? As a product shape gradually changes from one extreme shape to the other, does the affective response change in predictive manner? 2 What is the best way for obtaining the interpolated shapes? Are the results from two-dimensional (2D) image morphing as good as the results from three- dimensional (3D) shape morphing?