Research on appearance design of outdoor cabinets focusing on user’s emotional experience

Abstract

The appearance design of products is a complicated issue that concerns multiple factors relating to materials, structures, functions, colors, etc. Product modeling is an important medium for the communication between designers and clients. It is also an effective way to satisfy user’s emotional experience. In terms of products’ appearance modeling, designers have always been dedicated to the creation based on their own experience, inspirations and techniques. Due to the lack of effective evaluation system, it is difficult to deal with user’s emotional experience accurately and effectively. On the basis of the theory and methodology concerning Kansei engineering and imagery cognition, the paper conducts research on design procedures concerning the extraction and application of characteristic elements of product modality focusing on user’s emotional experience. It also achieves the systematic expression of user’s emotional experience on the level of imagery cognition, and conducts relevant experiments and analysis aiming to set up the evaluation system focusing on the effective expression of product modeling features. The paper takes the design case of outdoor cabinet as an example. Through the virtual construction of product modeling, the paper conducts analysis of perceptual image based on virtual reality from the perspective of user’s emotional experience, thus constructing the model of image descriptions on form elements. It extracts characteristic semanteme influencing users emotional experience by utilizing semantic differential method and principal component analysis, analyzes and summarizes perceptual image factor. It analyzes product form elements by using morphology analyzing method, and finds out the corresponding relationship between perceptual image factor and product form. In order to provide theoretical reference to the form designer, this paper also offers a proposal to the issue of “how to conduct product form design and optimization through perceptual image factor”.