A study on the visual thinking in the sketching of product design

Author(s):  
Hangqin Zhang ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Filomena Curralo

Emotions are recognised as vital for human wellbeing and happiness, so are objects. However, studies on the practical use of emotions in product design remain limited. This academic project promoted the pedagogical encounter between emotions/dyads and the morphology/shape of products, based on the Plutchik’s Emotion Wheel. The purpose is to improve and develop future designers’ awareness of the emotive character of forms. In a visual thinking exercise, first-year students chose eight basic emotions to develop the forms of an ‘emotional chair’, drawing with pencil and paper to allow visual thinking and interpretation. The findings suggest that the Emotion Wheel is useful to reflect and manipulate forms to convey meaning, helping designers understand how to use emotive shapes for idea development and decision-making in the design process. This paper can contribute to teaching product design targeting emotional products, and offers guidance on how to evoke positive emotions through products. Keywords: Product design, drawing, emotions, forms.


2008 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 181-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Allbutt ◽  
Jonathan Ling ◽  
Thomas M. Heffernan ◽  
Mohammed Shafiullah

Allbutt, Ling, and Shafiullah (2006) and Allbutt, Shafiullah, and Ling (2006) found that scores on self-report measures of visual imagery experience correlate primarily with the egoistic form of social-desirable responding. Here, three studies are reported which investigated whether this pattern of findings generalized to the ratings of imagery vividness in the auditory modality, a new version of the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire ( Marks, 1995 ), and reports of visual thinking style. The measure of social-desirable responding used was the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (BIDR; Paulhus, 2002 ). Correlational analysis replicated the pattern seen in our earlier work and of the correlations with the egoistic bias, the correlation with vividness of visual imagery was largest and significant, the correlation with visual thinking style next largest and approached significance, and the correlation with vividness of auditory imagery was the smallest and not significant. The size of these correlations mirrored the extent to which the three aspects of imagery were valued by participants.


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