Exploration Of The Stylistic Design Based On The Contexual Attribute Inherent In Signs

In the age of perceptual consumption, forms of products have been the essential marriage between consumers and designers. Besides, the research as to stylistic features is conducive both to conveying social and cultural information embedded in a product and to establishing a distinctive product identity. The cognition and design of style covers interdisciplinary knowledge including Psychology, Linguistics, Semiotics, Computer Technology, Industrial Design, Ergonomics and so on. However, present efforts at the research on style are mostly limited to seeking a language to express style or are mainly focused on the exploration of the effects of formal elements on style. Actually these efforts tends to simplify those complex and diverse stylistic problems. They will not really help realize the stylistic design of products. For this reason, I put forth a tentative approach based on signs' contextual attributes trying to build a computer-aided prototype system for the stylistic design of glasses.This thesis firstly explains the new tendency of product design in the 21st century. Then it presents the current achievements and trends of Semiotics and correlative feature-based design both of which have a lot to do with stylistic issues. Afterwards, it probes into existing written words as to the cognition and rebuilding of style and points out their problems. In this way, a new design methodology and procedure is necessitated.In the 2nd chapter, the three components of the contextual attributes are introduced respectively, namely the form of a sign, the structure of a sign and the meaning of a sign. As is known to all, people's understanding of the integrity of a product (style) is greatly impacted by the form and structure of a sign. Therefore, this thesis explains in detail the form of a sign and its corresponding meanings as well as different rules embedded in the structure of a sign. These rules dictate products' combinations and structural relationships in the stylistic design system and indirectly affect the expressiveness of style and its degree. At the end of this chapter, I instantiate the composition of a complete sign system with glasses.In the 3rd chapter I put an emphasis on the exploration and discussion of some key methodologies and theories concerning the quantification of style all of which cohere around the concept "feature". As attributes of stylisitic entity, features are represented as repetitive occurrence of signs and sign structures in products. Then we set up the stylistic cognition and matching model on the basis of the feature matching theory, which is of significance to both the selection of typical glasses into the database for stylistic glasses and to the filtration of common feature sets. Finally I build a linear computational model of the degree of style aimed at such simple products as glasses on the basis of the contextual attributes of features.In the 4th chapter a case study of glasses based on contextual attributes of signs is conducted to instantiate and verify those theories mentioned in the former chapters. At the end of this chapter a tentative computer-aided prototype system for stylistic design is built. Yet it is supposed to work when designing simple products such as glasses. I hope that the system will help to shift the practice experience to some feasible theory.I should say my research has efficaciously introduced Semiotics into the cognition and design of style. By using experimental data I exemplify the effect of features' contextual attributes on their corresponding styles. This may open up a new way for the explorations of computation models for style aimed at more advanced while more complicated products.