| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣科技大學 === 設計研究所 === 96 === This research seeks to understand the relationship between variations in product appearance and consumers’ preferences. Two automobile brands, BMW and Cadillac, are selected for investigation. The investigation began by computing the average automobile shape of a brand, by using image morphing and composition techniques. For each brand, a semantic differential study was then conducted by using the average automobile shape and representative car models as stimuli for two groups of participants – designers and general users – to understand their affective responses.
The results indicate that both designers and general users prefer automobile shapes exhibiting strong, dynamic, dazzling, comfortable, contemporary, and emotional images. The preference curves are similar to the Wundt curve proposed by Berlyne, where preferences are the strongest for automobiles that deviate from the average shape by a moderate amount. However, the designers showed preferences toward more innovative shapes, whereas, for general users, preferences quickly drop off for automobile shapes deviate too much from the average. For affective attributes such as “simple – complex” and “truthful –exaggerated”, general users prefer shapes near the average, whereas designers prefer more innovative shapes.
The research results empirically confirm the presence of the Wundt curve for the preferences towards automobile shapes, for a number of important affective attributes. In addition, the results highlight the different levels of tolerances for innovation shapes between designers and general users, which should be taken into account when proposing new automobile designs to the market.
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