Project Title: Product Aesthetics & its measurement

Supervisor : Prof. B. Ravi, Mechanical Engineering and Prof. B. K. Chakravarthy, IDC School of Design

The Aesthetics or Beauty of a product in general means its visual appeal and it is one of the most vital goals in the Industrial design of products. The product experience goes beyond just visual appeal and encompasses all our empirical abilities such as touch, taste, olfactory and hearing. “Artworks are things perceived through the senses. Thus an understanding of art depends in part on an understanding of sense of perception” (Dominic, 1997), extending this logic to product aesthetics we can state that aesthetic judgment of Products depends on our sense of perception. Leonardo believed that sight was the most important of all the senses. He held a view that   “The imagination cannot visualise such beauty as is seen by the eye”.The knowledge of aesthetic appeal and its systematic application to artifacts / products is of immense importance to the designers. While a lot of work on aesthetic guidelines has been set in art circles, the similar attempts on products are not well known. The designers played on shapes & their meaning (both connotative and denotative) as a tool to evoke positive emotions and producing the “Designer” products which were aesthetically superior to their early similar cousins. The usability and function have become defaults and appearance the only differentiator. This has led to the search for the right ingredients and recipe to design the most attractive & hence successful products.

The Aesthetic judgment is very subjective and qualitative and opinions widely vary from people to people and context to context. However, in real life we see people do converge to decide on the Aesthetics by various methods such as paired comparison, semantic differential, decision matrix, ranking and use of eye movements with special trackers etc.,
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The aim of current research is to come up with a metrics to judge the aesthetic value for a given set of artifacts/ products through a systematic visual study & experimentation.  Methodology will consist of designing various product stimuli drawn out of consumer durables to elicit varied responses.  The results of what impacted the most and how people made their choice will provide insights of the consumer aesthetic preference better and the learning’s can be exploited in formulating pedagogic guidelines & as a tool for design community.

Contact details:
Industrial Design Centre,
IIT Bombay , Powai,
Mumbai - 400076

Telephone:
091-022-25767812

E-mail:gprasad[at]iitb.ac.in