An exploration on tactile styles of products

Abstract

As an exploratory phase of the continuous study regarding tactile style of products, this paper employed semi-structured focus interview as the method to investigate and summarize whether people had more feelings towards products with vivid and obvious style for future reference. Therefore, this study intended to 1. identify the design styles that provoked strong feelings for the reference of tactile style in the future; 2. file the representative products and major form features of the design styles; 3. construct a set of vocabulary for the further images evaluation on design and tactile style in the future. In this research, 11 design experts were interviewed. All of them had long-term experience in design and profound understanding of design style. All of the interviews were videotaped and edited for a comprehensive analysis to yield results as follows: 1. In accordance with the frequency mentioned by the experts, 7 design styles for products that stimulate strong feelings were identified; 2. Summarizing the contents and forms of design styles, it was discovered that evolution of design style progressed incessantly like following a spiral path; 3. The representative products and their form features (shapes, materials, and colors) of each design style were classified; 4. The representative feeling images of each of the design style were obtained and summarized to derive a set of 28 paired image words for further image evaluation. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.