Retail design: lighting as an atmospheric tool, creating experiences which influence consumers’ mood and behaviour in commercial spaces

Retail design is no new discipline, but a scientific approach is of rather recent date. Since atmosphere has been proven to have an influence on consumer’s behaviour from a marketing point of view, this Ph.D. focuses on the designers’ perspective. This paper addresses one aspect of atmosphere: lighting and its influence on consumers’ mood and buying behaviour. Following an introduction in the discipline of retail design, we discuss the notion of ‘atmosphere’ and its relationship to lighting. We also develop a theoretical framework as a first part of a three-part process: literature review, experiments and validation. This first part includes the development of hypotheses and research questions. We will summarise a long tradition of research into architectural physics and psychology in both retail and work environments. Additionally, we also attempt to describe the applied research category: research by design. The set-up of the first experiment, currently undertaken, is explained via its method (participants, instruments, procedure) with an analysis of the preliminary results. Furthermore, the second part - the experiments and a design - and the third part - the development of guidelines - are briefly described. Keywords: Retail Design; Lighting; Consumer Behaviour; Research By Design; Mood; Atmosphere</p

Design Grammar - a pedagogical approach for observing teacher and student interaction.

Teacher and student interaction in a design-studio setting, also referred to as tutorial-learning or learning-by-doing, has been the blueprint of design education for decades. A crucial difficulty of design education is that the content of these meetings remains remarkably implicit. In this study we propose to explore the concept of Design Grammar as an observation framework for teacher-student interactions. Design grammar can be defined as the visual language used to design, i.e., the elements, and relationships between them, that are synthesized in the Form (understood as a unified structure of parts) of an artifact. In order to make this concept operational we developed a Design Grammar Model (DGM) which explicits the different elements involved in form-giving in design. We used the DGM to analyze the content of the interactions of junior Industrial Design students. We compared the results in terms of the student and teacher’s fluency in Design Grammar (DG), the criteria to evaluate fluency was: the frequency of references to DG, variety of references and articulation of DG elements. The main insight of our study was the observation that interactions with students with lower fluency in DG resulted in poorer performances from the teacher and therefore lower quality interactions

Considerable Variability Among Transplant Nephrologists in Judging Deceased Donor Kidney Offers

Introduction: Transplant clinicians may disagree on whether or not to accept a deceased donor kidney offer. We investigated the interobserver variability between transplant nephrologists regarding organ acceptance and whether the use of a prediction model impacted their decisions.Methods: We developed an observational online survey with 6 real-life cases of deceased donor kidneys offered to a waitlisted recipient. Per case, nephrologists were asked to estimate the risk of adverse outcome and whether they would accept the offer for this patient, or for a patient of their own choice, and how certain they felt. These questions were repeated after revealing the risk of adverse outcome, calculated by a validated prediction model. Results: Sixty Dutch nephrologists completed the survey. The intraclass correlation coefficient of their estimated risk of adverse outcome was poor (0.20, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.08–0.62). Interobserver agreement of the decision on whether or not to accept the kidney offer was also poor (Fleiss kappa 0.13, 95% CI 0.129–0.130). The acceptance rate before and after providing the outcome of the prediction model was significantly influenced in 2 of 6 cases. Acceptance rates varied considerably among transplant centers. Conclusion: In this study, the estimated risk of adverse outcome and subsequent decision to accept a suboptimal donor kidney varied greatly among transplant nephrologists. The use of a prediction model could influence this decision and may enhance nephrologists’ certainty about their decision.</p

Are Usability Problems Dependent on Product Properties?

Nowadays a half of the reasons for returns of consumer electronic products have little to do with technical problems, but are based on so called ???soft problems???, consumer complaints that cannot be traced back to technical problems. Nevertheless, the number of studies investigating what made soft problems occur is scare. Several explanations are possible for the phenomenon that soft problems are so numerous and even increasing. Product development teams might not take these problems serious. However, one of the major reasons would be the fact that the current products are continuously changing in terms of size, function and experience. Therefore, this paper focuses on the product properties: the question is whether soft problems are (partly) dependent on product properties, and if so, how product properties play a role with soft problems. To investigate the role of product properties in soft problems a questionnaire survey was conducted with 567 respondents. The conclusions were drawn that there are indeed differences in type of soft problems depending on product properties. This study can provide product development teams with an in-depth understanding of the influence of product properties in use problems

Problem Structuring and Information Access in Design

In order to design proper information systems for designers, it is important to understand how they enrich their knowledge base during the design process, what triggers their queries for information, what strategies they use and what factors influence their behaviour in relation to information seeking. Exploring these questions requires a closer look into the design process and the factors that influence information intake. Taking Newell and Simon’s (1972) theory of human problem solving, we discuss different aspects of the design process that are relevant to information access during the early stages of this process, and we discuss the implications of such aspects in the design of information systems to support designers. Design is primarily a problem solving activity, (but not a common one) because of the special nature of the problems it solves. Classical literature on cognitive science considers human problem solving as an information processing activity, and problem solvers as information processing systems. Newell and Simon proposed that a

The role of design properties and demographic factors in soft usability problems

User-centred design and co-design are nowadays prevalent in product design. However, the number of product returns in consumer electronic industry is continuously increasing. Most complaints are not technical in nature but have to do with non-technical or ???soft??? problems. Our study investigates these problems with electronic devices in relation to design properties, characteristics of users and their follow-up (re)actions. The results show that people massively complain about a large variety of products, from computers to e-book readers, and from washing machines to vacuum cleaners. Soft problems are the outcome of the interaction between user characteristics and design properties. Whether users take action upon their complaints also depend on their background. The results have to be translated into a design language.close0

APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR SEARCHING USER EXPERIENCE

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