The construction of the picture database for different ethnic life styles: A case study of lifestyles of health and sustainability (LOHAS)

Abstract

Emotional attraction has been a major motive for consumers to purchase commodities. As the rising of consumers’ purchase motive is one of the main design objectives, affective attraction is the key core of product design. To realize the objective, designers have adopted many methods in the design process. Among these methods, it is the most common one to stimulate ideas with picture boards which can be used to directly express and distinguish product pictures and also as a tool of affective evaluation. The research targets to the life style boards proposed by Baxter, as they are widely used. The research aims to build a database which can provide proper pictures to express different life style ethnics’ life images, waste a huge amount of time and reduce the burden of artificially collecting pictures. In the research, 100 consumers are firstly invited for screening the life style ethnics and 23 representatives selected. Then, 6 experts and scholars from different fields are invited to select the adjective words and pictures for the life style ethnics, and then the SD evaluation investigation is made among the 23 representatives to obtain the adjective words and pictures of the LOHAS’ life styles. The research result will significantly influence the design process, improve the product design efficiency, increase the expression accuracy of design pictures and allow more people to participate in the design process of image boards. Besides, the research result can be extended to other fields, including industry, manufacturing industry or education sector, which can increase users’ happiness and satisfaction, and improve the product market competitiveness.