| Summary: | 碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 應用美術學系碩士班 === 105 === With the progression of time, people are living better lives now but also facing more stress and responsibilities. It is critical for modern people to maintain work efficiency by keeping healthy mental conditions. Therefore, the “healing trend”, which refers to smooth people’s anxiety by offer relax products, has started to grow gradually during the past few years. In this trend, females are the main customers of such healing products, and all the customers are soothed mentally by looking at the adorable characters and products. In 2014, KOBITOS, which shows “adorably ugly” characteristics in their product designs, launched a series of healing-characters in Taiwan. Since the features of KOBITOS’ design is “adorable and ugly” which certainly different from traditional healing product that are "adorable and pretty", KOBITOS remains high popularity in Taiwan. Also, the design components of KOBITOS’ charming and healing characters have become the motivation of this research. The purpose of this research is to understand the preference of the female customers who are the main buyers of healing products, and to clarify the relationship between concrete elements (model) and abstract elements (adjectives) of KOBITOS.
The research first applies thorough interviews and evaluation construct method to analyze the reason why KOBITOS is considered adorable. According to the results, we conclude there are 7 concrete elements and 5 abstract elements that influence people’s perception. After that, we designed a questionnaire based on the result from previous steps. Finally, we established factor analysis and descriptive statistics. In the factor analysis, the results shows that why KOBITOS directly affect females’ preferences to the product are because KOBITOS is “adorable and funny”, “weak”, “silly”, and “harmless”. In the descriptive statistics, we found that the 7 concrete elements that related to KOBITOS’ design are all include the feeling of “silliness”, which conduct directly to the expression of KOBITOS. Besides, fat, red cheeks; small, round, drooping eyes; these are all abstract elements that influence people’s feelings to KOBITOS. Though KOBITOS offers adorable healing-characters as other competitors, KOBITOS gives us the feelings of easy-to-bullied, harmless, silly, and funny rather than simply brings sympathy. In other words, KOBITOS stands out from other alike characters by using the image of being weak.
As we usually see adorable and pretty healing-characters in the market, we hope that through our research, future designers will put the elements of “weak”, “silly”, “funny”, and “harmless” into their design instead of only place “adorable” elements into their consideration to make the characters become healing by their adorably-ugly characteristics.
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