Study On Passenger Car Form Perception Design Support Technology

Traditional designs mainly concerns about product functional features, but with the de-velopment of economy and improvement of consumption level, people nowadays pay atten-tion not only to product functional features, but also to form perception, which produce an ur-gent need for product form perception support technology. By the assistance of support tech-nology designers can efficiently transform consumers' blurred emotion needs into detail form element design styles in product design process. Current study on product form perception mainly do analysis based on designers'understanding but barely take consumers'needs into consideration, which is also due to the lack of form perception design support technology when designers know neither methods of evaluating nor recognizing product form perception, let along methods of integrating consumers'form perception needs into product form design process.This paper takes car product as an example and does analysis to the development, opti-mization and validation of a form perception appraisal scale. It steps from Kansei engineering, which can convert consumers'preference into products'exterior element style requirement, and therefore can indicate designers how to design consumer-oriented products.The tasks conducted in this study include developing an appraisal scale for car product form by first framing the set of appraisal words and then purifying it according to statistic methods and experts'opinion, establishing the relationship model between consumers'prefer-ence and car product form perceptions and proving its validity, finding out the latent factors which potentially affect consumer preference and establishing a model between consumer preference and those three factors; decomposing car exterior covers into several form design variables which can be further extended to form design elements, finally establishing the rela-tionship model between car product form perception and design variables.The results of this paper will help car product designers with technology support and other product designers with method reformation.