Meaning of Industrial Design Objects: From Designers to Users

S Mastandrea, A Zani, M V Giuliani and G Bove
Additional contact information
S Mastandrea: Istituto Superiore per le Industrie Artistiche, Via del Gesù 89, 00186 Rome, Italy
G Bove: Dipartimento di Statistica, Probabilità e Statistica Applicate, Università ‘La Sapienza’, 00185 Rome, Italy

Environment and Planning B, 1992, vol. 19, issue 3, 307-319

Abstract: Structural features of everyday objects of industrial design and expressive qualities possibly communicated by the same objects are investigated. The objective may be defined in terms of the following points: (1) communication between designers and users; (2) differences in appraisal between groups of experts and nonexperts; (3) systematic relationships between structural characteristics and expressive qualities of the objects considered. Three groups of subjects were interviewed: four designers responsible for the design of six objects, twenty advanced-level design students (experts), and twenty nonexpert students. All subjects had to fill in a questionnaire based on an open interview with the designers. The questionnaire was divided into two parts: structural characteristics and expressive characteristics. A multifactorial analysis and t -test were performed on the data. The results suggest that (1) communication between designers and users exists in a large number of item appraisals and is not the result of the ambiguity of the physical properties of the objects; (2) specific training in design has a direct influence upon object appraisal, indicating a certain differentiation between the groups of experts and nonexperts; (3) there are no systematic correlations between structural and expressive characteristics except in one very specific case: between the structural characteristic of shape and consistency of material, on the one hand, and the expressive qualities of dynamism, on the other.

Date: 1992
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/b190307 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envirb:v:19:y:1992:i:3:p:307-319

DOI: 10.1068/b190307

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning B
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().