| Summary: | 博士 === 國立成功大學 === 工業設計學系 === 104 === Competing market products generally do not carry significant variations in their technological levels, but differ, rather, in their aesthetics and designs; these two factors are decisive elements in the buying decision process. Understanding the relationship between people and product aesthetic appreciation is thus a vital issue in applications regarding aesthetics and consumers. According to the principle of product shape preference, some principles are not only related to aesthetics, but also to human instinct. For instance, most people perceive a sense of threat from sharp objects, preferring curvilinear shapes instead. In other words, not only can curve preference be utilized to study human biases through aesthetics, it can also reveal people’s emotional responses to curvilinear shapes through biological reactions. Therefore, in this research, physiological data and psychological measurements were employed through experiments. The experiments studied correlations between pupillary measurements and curvature preference, all to demonstrate the principle of shape aesthetics and study the influences that altering curvature degrees may have on emotional arousal.
The research purpose was attained through two phases of experimentation: (1) To confirm whether pupil size variation can be suitably applied in product evaluations by comparing pupil response variations in observations of openers and IAPS database images (positive, neutral, or negative emotions); (2) To evaluate curvature preference in products (without altering their prototype shapes) by determining whether curvature degree and product preference exhibit an inverted-U trend and whether product size or design background can play influences on curvature preference.
The results of the experiment one indicate: Through pupil size measurement, negative and other emotional responses (neutral and positive) triggered by products can be distinguished. Because ordinary products trigger mild emotional arousal, and designer products do not trigger extremely negative emotions, pupillary measurements are thus reliable tools to conduct product evaluations. Results from the experiment two indicate: In conditions where a product’s prototype form remained unaltered, product preference and product curvature degree can indeed display an inverted-U curve, and that product size can influence how people perceive the degree of curvature. Curvature degree in larger product sizes correlates to smaller degrees of practical curvature, and ultimately influences preference. Moreover, due to design background tends to remain uninfluenced by curvature preference, especially after the peak of preference. Hence, a significant difference emerges after the peak of preference, where the preference of people with a design background declines more sharply than that of participants without a design background.
After having demonstrated that pupillary variations can suitably be applied toward product evaluation and having evaluated the correlation between curvature degree in products and preference levels (without prototype differences), the influence of altered curvature degrees on emotional arousal was lastly studied by utilizing pupillary sizes to measure variations in curvature preference for product shape. The study was facilitated through a combination of four different products and five different curvature degrees. Results indicate that variations in product form curvature do not have significant differences in arousal, regardless of pupil variations or subjective evaluations. Through subjective preference evaluation, however, one can determine the extent to which altering curvature degrees in products with varying basic shapes can carry different effects.
The results of this study may be utilized as a reference for product form design, as well as serve as advice for designers working on second-generation products to consider altering curvature degrees according to their products’ basic shapes, so as to increase consumer preference for the product and thus elevate the desire to purchase them.
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