Kansei: the creative mind in the visual analyzing process

Background: Emotions are complex conscious states that play an essential role in our daily lives. They have a great influence on human perception, particularly concerning our thinking, learning and decisions. In design, product emotion plays an important role in encouraging product quality and sustainability. Several methods and tools exist and are used to in the process of evaluating users-emotional experiences with products. Emotion is important to design because virtually all the decisions we make are based on how we feel or how we anticipate we will feel. Kansei engineering is a consumer-oriented technique for new product development. In product design, for instance, clothing and fabric design can be applied to translate consumers’ favorite feelings or images into physical design elements. Methods: This paper aims to develop the process of evaluating users’ emotional experiences in a more accurate semantic dimension through Kansei. Image feature extraction is a key issue for concept recognition in images and particularly emotions. In analyzing the product images, KJ methods based on the affective model was used to develop the full range of emotional keywords. This method shows the potentiality, limitation and building of a new framework for understanding the semantic structure used by designers in the visual analysis process for fabric analysis of clothing. Another affective model from SD methods also needed to support all the data. Result: The results show that various methods of the affective model will be a good reference for design studies that are involved with users’ subjective emotional experience with product design. The emotional expression showed that it can be well engaged in the process of satisfied and dissatisfied or desired or undesired in product choices. Conclusions: The process of identifying consumer needs is an integral part of the larger product development process and most closely related to the conceptual design, design selection, competitive benchmarking and establishment of product specification. Kansei methods will lead to better perceptions and understanding of product images and forms

Strategies for consumer control of complex product forms in generative design systems

In recent years, the number of products that can be tailored to consumers' needs and desires has increased dramatically; there are many opportunities to individualize the colors, materials or options of products. However, current trends indicate that the future consumer will not be satisfied with mere material and color choices, but will desire control over form as well. While it is technically feasible to allow consumers to partially mass-customize the form of products subject to functional and production constraints through the use of a generative design system, the question of how the control of form should be presented to the user arises. The issue becomes especially important when the product form is based on complex morphologies, which require in-depth knowledge of their parameters to be able to control them fully. In this paper, we discuss this issue and present and test two strategies for controlling complex forms in consumer-oriented generative design systems, one offering the user full control over the design ("total control" strategy), while the other automatically generates designs for the user ("no control" strategy). The implementation of those two control strategies in a generative design system for two categories of products (bookshelf and table) and five types of morphologies are described and tested with a number of design interested participants to estimate their level of satisfaction with the two control strategies. The empirical study shows that the participants enjoyed both the total control and no control strategies. The development of the full control modes for the five morphologies was on the other hand not straightforward, and in general, making the controls meaningful to the consumer can be difficult with complex morphologies. It seems that a consumer-oriented generative design system with two different control strategies, as the ones presented in this article, would offer the most satisfaction

Beyond 'Global Production Networks': Australian Fashion Week's Trans-Sectoral Synergies

When studies of industrial organisation are informed by commodity chain, actor network, or global production network theories and focus on tracing commodity flows, social networks, or a combination of the two, they can easily overlook the less routine trans-sectoral associations that are crucial to the creation and realisation of value. This paper shifts attention to identifying the sites at which diverse specialisations meet to concentrate and amplify mutually reinforcing circuits of value. These valorisation processes are demonstrated in the case of Australian Fashion Week, an event in which multiple interests converge to synchronize different expressions of fashion ideas, actively construct fashion markets and enhance the value of a diverse range of fashionable commodities. Conceptualising these interconnected industries as components of a trans-sectoral fashion complex has implications for understanding regional development, world cities, production location, and the manner in which production systems “touch down” in different places

A theoretical model for design in Management science : the paradigm shift in the design profession for management as a constraint to management science as an opportunity

Design Management has changed greatly since 1990 Peter Gorb definition .The purpose of this paper is to synthetize the various models of Design Management and to explain their limits in front of the paradigm shift of the design profession, changing “from an activity based profession to a knowledge based profession” professor Yjro Sotamaa- UIAH The territory of design in Management science will be developed in detail with the limits of these diverging forces. The converging model of Design value management based not on practices but on management science models will be explained with its proactive force. Finally ,this value model will be applied enhancing its pertinence in the emerging “design leadership” trend and consequently the potential for a “design thinking “ input in front of the new challenges of contemporary managers : sense building, complexity , innovation , Socially Responsible Organizations

Social Sustainability: A design research approach to sustainable development

While issues such as clean production and energy efficiency are still central in sustainable development discourse, attention is increasingly on patterns of consumption at multiple levels in society. This opens new opportunities and responsibilities for design research, as we shift from a focus on product lifecycles to people’s lifestyles. It also requires further understanding the ‘social sustainability’ aspects of the environment and development, including the complexity of problematics characterized by uncertainties, contradictions and controversies. In response, we propose a programmatic approach, in which a tentative assemblage of theoretical and experimental strategies frame a common ground for a collaborative and practice-led inquiry. We present a design research program based on two propositions: socio-cultural practices are the basic unit for design, and; transitions, and transition management, are the basic points of design intervention. Rather than affirming the status quo or the prevailing discourse, we argue for design research as a ‘critical practice’, in which cultural diversity, non-humans and multiple futures are considered

Using the Values-Practice Framework to adopt lifetime optimising behaviours: the case of maintenance

The influence that consumers have on the lifespan of products has attracted increased attention in recent years. Studies have provided an overall understanding of the factors that influence consumer attitudes and behaviours towards product longevity, categorised around the physical properties of a product, and individual and societal characteristics. However, such studies do not yet adequately explain how people could adopt product lifetime optimising behaviours. To fill this gap, the paper analyses a range of studies on what influences product lifetimes, focusing on maintenance activities. It proposes the use of the Values-Practice framework derived from two theoretical positions, social psychology and social practice theory, to consider how to facilitate the adoption of lifetime optimising behaviours. To build this framework, it analyses studies that classify factors influencing attitudes and behaviours towards product lifetimes and then links these to the ‘meaning’, ‘competence’ and ‘material’ elements of practice. The framework could be used as a tool to aid designers under stand the different elements and factors that engage people in maintenance activities. The paper concludes by considering the research requirements for the future application of the framework

Developing Scenarios for Product Longevity and Sufficiency

This paper explores the narrative of peoples’ relationships with products as a window on understanding the types of innovation that may inform a culture of sufficiency. The work forms part of the 'Business as Unusual: Designing Products with Consumers in the Loop' [BaU] project, funded as part of the UK EPSRC-ESRC RECODE network (RECODE, 2016) that aims to explore the potential of re-distributed manufacturing (RdM) in a context of sustainability. This element of the project employed interviews, mapping and workshops as methods to investigate the relationship between people and products across the product lifecycle. A focus on product longevity and specifically the people-product interactions is captured in conversations around product maintenance and repair. In exploring ideas of ‘broken’ we found different characteristics of, and motivations for, repair. Mapping these and other product-people interactions across the product lifecycle indicated where current activity is, who owns such activity (i.e. organisation or individual) and where gaps in interactions occur. These issues were explored further in a workshop which grouped participants to look at products from the perspective of one of four scenarios; each scenario represented either short or long product lifespans and different types of people engagement in the design process. The findings help give shape to new scenarios for designing sufficiency-based social models of material flows

The Impact of Experiential Augmented Reality Applications on Fashion Purchase Intention

Utilizing the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) model, the purpose of this study is to examine the effects of augmented reality (AR) (specifically augmentation) on consumers’ affective and behavioral response and to assess whether consumers’ hedonic motivation for shopping moderates this relationship. An experiment using the manipulation of AR and no AR was conducted with 162 participants aged between 18 and 35. Participants were recruited through snowball sampling and randomly assigned to the control or stimulus group. The hypothesized associations were analyzed using linear regression with bootstrapping. The paper demonstrates the benefit of using an experiential AR retail application (app) to positively impact purchase intention. The results show this effect is mediated by positive affective response. Furthermore, hedonic shopping motivation moderates the relationship between augmentation and the positive affective response. Because of the chosen research approach, the results may lack generalizability to other forms of augmentation. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to test the proposed model using different types of AR stimuli. Furthermore, replication of the study with other populations would increase the generalizability of the findings. Results of this study provide a valuable reference for retailers of the benefits of using AR when attempting to optimize experiential value in online environments. The study contributes to experiential retail and consumer purchase behavior research by deepening the conceptualization of the impact of experiential technologies, more specifically AR apps, by considering the role of hedonic shopping motivations.Peer reviewe

Retail Innovation - The never-ending road to success? A critical analysis of pitfalls and opportunities

This paper outlines the current and continuous changes occurring in the retail and social environment that necessitate the constant evolution of retail formats. Over recent years experiential retail formats have appeared in recognition of the increasing need to ‘entertain’ shoppers and satisfy their ‘leisure’ needs. A number of ‘best practice’ examples of such retail innovation have been presented. While such experiential innovations appear to be the ‘holy grail’ of modern retailing, they often require considerable investments of both capital and management time. This paper has used an autoethnographic approach to reflect upon the constraints and costs involved in the design, construction and operation of such a retail enterprise to provide a unique and holistic assessment of the benefits and challenges experiential innovation holds in developing new retail formats and initiatives. The findings from this research highlight a number of previously unreported pitfalls that are likely to be encountered, financially, operationally and symbolically. It is recommended that retailers continue to explore experiential innovations, but that they proceed with caution