The Research Of Prototype In Product Design

With the development of the society and the improvement of consumption, people's demands of consumption become more and more individual, emotional and sensible. Today, products can't be thought as simple forms, but a media for people to communicate. So the subjective, emotional and psychological factors have been becoming the most important parameters of a successful product. The research of this thesis is a searching and thinking of the consumer mentality.Firstly, the thesis discusses the meaning of prototype in some other subjects, and tries to get the conception of the prototype. During this process, I find prototype has some same features: the same people have strong stability in the same epoch, and these people have the same psychological response when they get the same stimulation; the prototype includes the most representative features of the same kind of the things; the prototype is accumulated by the increasing experience in our daily life.Secondly, with the research of the cognitive psychology of users, the thesis discusses whether the prototype can influence the user's cognition and tests the conclusion with a questionnaire of clamp. And then, the thesis tries to classify the type of the prototype, and analyses the characters of the prototype of design.The contribution of this thesis is applies prototype to the field of product design. The research have verified that prototype can influence the user's cognition of products; the prototype in the form of the product can give users the same feeling, and can solve the communication between users and designers. Besides, the thesis states the key points for applying prototype to product design.