Beyond functional design : examining emotive qualities of products evoked by visual appearance

Abstract

Industrial designers have been trying to design and 'style' products to elicit appropriate emotional responses according to their target group of users. Product styling features, forms and details contribute to these embedded emotional cues that attract the respective profile of users to buy a product. This dissertation is a study to see if these emotional cues embedded in the product(s) are indeed present and if so, how these emotional responses are related to the design of the product. Further, this project aims to determine if there are significant variances in emotional responses across cultural/ethnic groups.