CHAPTER 5 pdf (1.1 Mb)

To explore the feasibility of a visual database of design precedents a better understanding of how designers actually organize existing products was acquired. An organizing task, in which a collection of product examples had to be arranged, grouped and named, was designed and evaluated as a possible procedure for indexing products into a database.

 

Two groups of senior students of Industrial Design Engineering from Delft performed the task with four different classes of products, with one group receiving additional information in the form of a design brief. This condition was added to determine if such a design brief would lead to more similar organizations, induced by the abstract features which were listed in the brief.

RESULTS

Organizing products proved to be a natural and meaningful activity for designers, even though it did concern arranging, grouping and naming products on levels different from the common basic level. The names given to the groups could be easily assigned to the three product typologies, which indicated that these typologies together sufficiently span the space used by designers for organizing and describing products. The extra freedom given in the arranging task, in which grouping was not explicitly required, did not lead to readily interpreted information above that obtained in the grouping task. A two-step indexing procedure, consisting of a grouping task and a naming task, therefore seemed to be a suitable approach for entering products into the database.


The specific characteristics of a product class, such as telephones or sunglasses, did not seem to influence the organizing behavior of the subjects. The way(s) in which they arranged, grouped and named the products appeared to be consistent across all four product classes. Contrary to what was expected the design brief did not result into different organizations. This was attributed to the fact that the features listed in the brief were probably given less importance by the subjects in their assessments than the features of the products themselves, which were much more prominently and visually present during the experiment.