Assessing the performance of styling activities: An interview study with industry professionals in style-sensitive companies

Published Date

January 2016, Vol.42:33–55, doi:10.1016/j.destud.2015.10.001

Title 

Assessing the performance of styling activities: An interview study with industry professionals in style-sensitive companies

• Author 

• Oscar Person ^,

• Department of Design, School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Aalto University, Helsinki, FI-00076 AALTO, Finland

• Dirk Snelders
• Jan Schoormans

• Department of Product Innovation Management, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology, 2628 CE, Delft, The Netherlands

Available online 10 November 2015.

Highlights

• •
  Interview study on the performance assessment of styling activities.
• •
  Assessing styling by profitability, visibility and professional acknowledgment.
• •
  How product sales, press coverage and awards function as measures for styling.

In this paper, we study the design activity of styling and its performance assessment within style-sensitive manufacturing companies. Based on interviews with industry professionals at such companies, we analyze how the contribution of styling and expressive products is perceived and assessed. We delineate how these companies stimulate sales and profits, enhance their brand visibility and promote the wider acknowledgment of their capabilities in the market through styling. We also describe how press coverage and design awards function as performance measures for styling activities alongside product sales. In addition, we describe how the perceived contribution of styling activities and its assessment are codependent on how the companies and their designers operate and make decisions on the expressiveness of products.

Keywords

• design performance
• new product development
• styling

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• ∗ 
  Corresponding author. Oscar Person
  
  

For further details log on website :
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0142694X15000824

The role of precedents in increasing creativity during iterative design of electronic embedded systems

Published Date

May 2014, Vol.35(3):298–326, doi:10.1016/j.destud.2014.01.001

Title 

The role of precedents in increasing creativity during iterative design of electronic embedded systems

• Author 

• Alex Doboli ^,
• Anurag Umbarkar

• Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY 11794-2350, USA

Available online 7 February 2014.

Highlights

• •
  Effect of precedents on creativity during iterative design of embedded system.
• •
  Precedents decrease design variety and do not significantly influence novelty and quality.
• •
  Iterative design and group settings improve design utility.
• •
  Incrementally changing the design requirements does not increase novelty.
• •
  Groups help design evaluation but can obstruct problem framing and implementation.

This paper presents a study on the role of precedents in illuminating creative ideas during iterative design for solving open-ended problems in electronic embedded systems. Through an experimental study grounded in cognitive psychology, this work examined the influence of precedents on the novelty, variety, quality, and utility of design solutions devised through an iterative design process involving groups of participants. Another tested hypothesis was whether incremental changes of requirements improve novelty. Results show that precedents did not increase solution novelty and quality, but improved utility. Precedents reduced design feature variety as solutions converged toward a few dominant designs. Incremental modification of requirements did not increase novelty.

Keywords

• creativity
• design precedents
• system design
• design cognition
• iterative design

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• ∗ 
  Corresponding author: Alex Doboli
  
  

For further details log on website :
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0142694X14000027

Aesthetic Design Process: Descriptive Design Research and Ways Forward

Published Date

Volume 34 of the series Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies pp 375-385

Title 

Date: 24 December 2014

Author 

Aesthetic Design Process: Descriptive Design Research and Ways Forward

• Santosh Jagtap 
• , Sachin Jagtap

Abstract

Consumer response to designed products has a profound effect on how products are interpreted, approached and used. Product design is crucial in determining this consumer response. Research in this field has been centered on studying the relationship between product features and subjective responses of users and consumers to those features. The subject of aesthetic or styling design process has been relatively neglected despite the important role of this process in fulfilling intended consumer response through product design. In this paper, we present a review of descriptive design research on aesthetic design process, and highlight limitations of this research. We also suggest opportunities for further descriptive research on the subject of aesthetic design process.

References

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    Bangle, C.: The ultimate creativity machine: how BMW turns art into profit. Harvard Bus. Rev. 79(1), 47–55 (2001)
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    Tovey, M., Porter, S., Newman, R.: Sketching, concept development and automotive design. Des. Stud. 24(2), 135–153 (2003)CrossRef
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    Jagtap, S., et al.: How design process for the base of the pyramid differs from that for the top of the pyramid. Des. Stud. (2014)
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    Crilly, N., Clarkson, P.: The influence of consumer research on product aesthetics. In: Proceedings of the 9th International Design Conference (DESIGN 2006), Design Society (2006)
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    Liem, A., Abidin S., Warell, A.: Designers’ perceptions of typical characteristics of form treatment in automobile styling. In: 5th International Workshop on Design & Semantics of Form and Movement, DesForm (2009)
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For further details log on website :
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-81-322-2232-3_33

Industrial design strategies for eliciting surprise

Published Date

May 2014, Vol.35(3):273–297, doi:10.1016/j.destud.2013.12.001

Title 

Industrial design strategies for eliciting surprise

• Author 

• Edgar R. Rodríguez Ramírez ^,

• School of Design, Victoria University of Wellington, PO Box 600, Wellington, New Zealand

Available online 8 January 2014.

Highlights

• •
  Surprise is an emotion designers often wish to elicit through their products.
• •
  Interviews asked thirty influential designers worldwide how they intend to surprise.
• •
  State of the art methodology, situational analysis, was used for the analysis of interviews.
• •
  Positional maps that suggest patterns and strategies designers use to surprise were developed.
• •
  Eleven strategies offer explicit knowledge and partly uncover the mysticism around designers.

This paper reports on strategies industrial designers use when attempting to elicit surprise. Thirty senior representatives from influential design organisations were interviewed. A situational analysis of the responses suggests strategies that designers use as motivation for starting a design project. These include observations of social issues in the designers’ world and observations of their personal experience at behavioural, cognitive and emotional levels. We also found strategies that designers apply during the design process: using archetypes in unexpected contexts/objects, challenging assumptions of appearance, magical interactions, the smart doubling of things and unexpected scale. We suggest that a research through design approach may uncover further strategies that designers use implicitly and did not explicitly mention during the interviews.

Keywords

• design strategy
• industrial design
• psychology of design
• design and surprise

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• ∗ 
  Corresponding author: Edgar R. Rodríguez Ramírez

For further details log on website :
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0142694X13000975