The significance of form elements: A study of representational content of design sketches
Authors: S. Z. Abidin1,3, A. Warell 2, A. Liem 3
Institutions: 1Universiti Teknologi Mara (Malaysia), 2Lund University (Sweden), 3Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Norway)
Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to understand the significance of form elements through the interpretations of design sketches. These interpretations are provided by designers themselves interpreting expressive characteristics of car images, and by students interpreting the sketches of designers’ morphing sequences. In the experimental investigation of the sketching process through morphing sequence exercises, designers used individually driven styles and approaches when creating product form. These approaches produce characteristically different form ideas, which differ (but also show consistency) with respect to type of car category, expression, identity, recognition, format, composition, complexity, etc. Typically, assessment of generated sketch work and ideas is done using relative heuristic evaluation in a comparative design review. Given a large set of automotive sketches, general patterns of styling emphasis can be identified. The paper concludes that perceptions of designers are varied due to the representation format of the ideas as visual hand sketches. The visual hand sketches point out certain meaning and can be categorized with respect to perceptual characteristics according to the Product Perception Framework (PPE framework) and suggest that a tool to support evaluation and generation of early design concepts can be developed, and to support the generation of form ideas with desired characteristics for a brand, product category and market.
Keywords: aesthetics, categorization, form, perception, visual