Product personality: From analysing to applying

Product personality: From analysing to applying

Pourtalebi Hendehkhaleh, S.
Pouralvar, K.

Industrial Design Engineering

Design Engineering

2012-12-31

Nowadays products are expected to undertake their functions properly and the competition for satisfying consumer is in the field of product attachments and emotional characteristics. Products have a symbolic meaning in addition to their utilitarian benefits. This symbolic meaning that refers to physical product and is described with human personality characteristics is called "product personality". Consumers make a psychological comparison between their self-concept and the image of a product and the result of this comparison can positively influence product evaluation. The main mission of a designer is a problem solving one and designing a product appearance is a problem solving process as well. Students during the industrial design studios learn how to utilize design techniques in product's functional problem solving, but the emotional design aspects and techniques are usually neglected. Therefore, students should learn how personal characteristics in objects' form can be recognized and how they can apply personality in product's appearance. This paper introduces the method of "product personality" design as a problem solving process. This pedagogical process of "product personality" has been developed to help industrial design students to improve their abilities to understand form's capabilities and utilize them in designing products' appearance. After learning and practicing this process, students are able to express roles of a product's visual elements performing in product personality. Furthermore they can translate these performances into rules and finally employ rules as solutions in product personality design as problem. The process includes three main phases of analysing, translating and applying.

product personality, aesthetics, pedagogical design process, product appearance
responsibilities, user-product attachment

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:e1edbc52-08d3-4e11-95bc-3148545d84f4

The Design Society, Institution of Engineering Designers

978-1-904670-36-0

Design education for future wellbeing: Proceedings of the 14th international conference on engineering and product design education (E&PDE 2012), Antwerp (Belgium), 6-7 Sept., 2012

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2012 Pourtalebi Hendehkhaleh, S., Pouralvar, K.