The Factors And Methods Of Affective Design In Car Styling

The topic of this thesis is derived from the issues in the National Design Research Programs and commercial car styling projects,which are: Firstly,what is the mechanism of cognition,comprehension and appreciation in the case of a user tries to contact,perceive and experience a product,and what is logical relationship between the result of experience and the physical styling features.Secondly,in a practical design process,how to detect,analyze and guide the users ' needs,and what kind of thinking,methods and procedures could be used in obtaining the design outputs which could meet the needs,and what tools could test and evaluate the design output.In order to solve the issues above,this thesis focuses the range of study on car styling and affective experience according to the supporting programs,and makes the research topic as “The Factors and Methods of Affective Design in Car Styling”.The research goals are: Firstly,to state the factors of affective design in car styling,and deduce the relationship between the affective factors.Secondly,to construct a design method which could deal with the problems in automobile affective experience design based on the relationship between the affective factors.The research follows the principle of combining the theoretical and practical basis.In the theoretical aspect,the research methods of “literature investigation” and “contrastive analysis” are used to gather numbers of hypotheses and models related to the research topic,and then find out the appropriate ones as references.In the practical aspect,the research methods of “case analysis” and “questionnaire” are used to acquire the instance information and application data which can verify the models and tools presented in the research.The following are included in the practical basis: the design projects are the Styling Improvement of Dongfeng Jingyi X5,the Concept Electric Car Design,the Micro Electric Car Design,and the research projects are the Research on Product Genetic Aesthetic Design Method in the Corporation,the Test on the Dynamic Feeling Representation on the Featured Lines on the Side Car Body,and field investigation into the history of European automotive styling development.The main achievements of this thesis are summarized as following:Firstly,the thesis makes the statement that the affective design includes 3 basic factors,which are affective object,affective role and affective semantic s.Such statement is based on Donald Norman's theory of Conceptual Schema in product design communication,and supported by the Dialectical Materialism Epistemology.Therefore,the statement has a strong and reliable basis.The research on each affective factor goes further.By analyzing the attributes of volume,treatment and graphic in affective object,a simple model is made to illustrate how the car styling features are driven to evolve.The affective roles are classified into 3 groups: users,designers and managers,and the dissimilarities of the roles are discussed.The affective semantics is divided into emotional experience and meaningful experience,and the information exchange details and levels of the 2 kinds of experience are well studied.Secondly,the relationship model of the 3 affective factors is constructed and developed wider and further based on the research achievements of the affective factors.By analyzing the affective roles' styling information processing,the basic affective factors relationship is developed into an interactive model,which describes the detailed relationship that several affective roles transfer affective semantics information to each other using affective object as media.According to the study of the driving factors of car styling evolution,the automotive technology and culture can influence the generation of affective needs and intentions.The developed interactive relationship model of affective factors is capable of illustrating the main process of how the managers and designers encode the affective information and how the users decode,and such model can serve as the logical frame of the automobile affective design flow.Thirdly,the specialized tools for solving the problems in the 2 kinds of affective semantic experience design,including a Product Emotion Measurement tool named “Emotion Compass”,and a Feature Semantic Deduction tool.1)The “Emotion Compass” is developed to evaluate the emotional experience result of the design outputs.Several emotion classification models are compared and one of them is taken as reference of the architecture of the tool.Combined with the study on non-verbal form of the illustration of different kinds of emotions,the details of the interface,operation and analytical approach of “Emotion Compass” are well designed.Moreover,the tool is tested with the proposals in a practical car design project,and the result shows that “Emotion Compass” is competent for providing the users' emotional experience information in product assessment process.2)Not only can the Feature Semantic Deduction tool evaluate the semantic experience result of the design output,but also can work in design procedure by providing thinking clues.According to the fact shown by an experimental result that the car styling feature is strongly connected to the design semantics,using the Feature Comparison Model as reference,and combining the improvement according to the actual car design scene,the tool presents a path to simulate and analyze the process of how the internal attribute of the styling feature converts to styling semantics through styling imagery.Finally,the car styling affective design flow based on the affective factors relationship is founded.It is discussed that affective design is essentially a process of organizing,deducing and implementing the information of affective experience,during the process the media of the information will be constructed and modified.The construction of the design flow refers to the tasks stages based samples and the information transferring clue based samples,combing the basic logical frame and specialized tools,eventually becomes a design method system.Furthermore,the method of evaluating the affective semantic s is presented,and the segments which are prone to generate information distortion are point out in the design flow.This thesis is utilitarian both in truth seeking and practice operating.In aspect of truth seeking,the research presents a possible mechanism which describes the way people perceive and process the affective information in car styling.In the aspect of usage development,the research presents an operable working flow,which makes the design problems solving process become more reliable,credible and controllable.