Product Phenetics as an Alternative to Establish a Relationship Between Morphology and Perception Associated to Industrial Products

Abstract

One way of linking relations of design proposals with the meanings they connote and denote is through morphological analysis. This work puts forward a new tool for product design analysis which is based on phenetics and statistical cluster analysis. Power tools with different morphological configurations and which be-long to a common family of products available on the market, are compared and grouped together. Based on cognitive impression, emotional, and buying inten-tion data compiled from users, the profiles of the different product groups are discussed, and differences are analyzed between them with respect to these fac-tors. There are significant differences between factors of the different morpho-logical clusters, which justifies as valid the proposed dissimilarity index.