The Influence of Material Selection in Emotional Attributes of Product Design

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

MA of Industrial Design, Lecturer, Department of Industrial Design, Tabriz Islamic Art University, Tabriz

Abstract

Selecting material is one of the most important phases in product design and manufacturing process of any physical product. Choosing the optimal possibility for production among vast variety of materials that are being developed in diversity and number is a very difficult, lengthy and expensive process which makes it one of the major challenges of engineers and designers. Approximately always more than one material is suitable for a designed part of a product, and the final selection may contain some advantages as well as disadvantages. Different purposes and criteria are involved in this decision making, the main ones are: Will the chosen material meet the performance needs? Will it be easy and feasible to process in designed shape? Will it satisfy aesthetics and emotional requirements? In the field of technical and engineering aspects of a product design, reaching to an optimal selection is more formulated and possible through many logical and effective methods purposed by researchers and scientists but visual and emotional design of a product is much more complicated and less formulated which depends on many aspects such as cultural, social, psychological and behavioral studies of users.  Users make sense of things through visual stimulus and get information. Objects can have meaning, carry associations, or be symbols of more abstract ideas. And design is not a meaningless exercise in styling and it is not an isolated exploration of technology. How can a design be shaped to influence the emotions of the customer in the right way? Product designers seek to blend the technical with the aesthetic, in order to enable new experiences and inspire and create positive impact in society and in our own daily lives. They use materials to create all these. Technical designers have ready access to information of the sort they need, handbooks, selection software, advisory services from material suppliers, and to analysis and optimization codes for safe, economical design. Industrial designers express frustration, both in print and in interviews, that they do not have equivalent support.  This paper seeks to address the following questions: 1) Can a material be said to have perceived attributes or indisputable associations? 2) Is there any way to examine the emotional impact of material in a product? In this research, by examining different methods and theories in the field of material selection, it has been tried to identify emotional aspects of materials through a case study. The test is consisted of questionnaire and survey from users, about the emotional impact of various materials in a specific product. Respondents were asked to talk about their emotional perceptions through the 24 materials of a flower vase.  The rather high diversity of gathered words and attributes showed that attendants were not so much comfortable in using word to express their emotions about products. In the next stage the attributes which had similar meanings classified together and the frequency of them were calculated. The final result shows that in some cases reaching to a common emotional alphabet expressed by different materials is not unattainable.
 

Keywords

References

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Journal of Fine Arts: Visual Arts
Volume 21, Issue 3
December 2016
Pages 87-94

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