The Assessment of Consumers' Pleasure Intensity Evoking by Cultural Products.

Nowadays, consumer products not only have to fit functional requirements as well as increasing performance, but also be able to please users in using products under a highly pressure working environment and requiring a higher quality product in daily life. Hence, to experiencing pleasure through using products, designing a product with cultural characteristic seems to have a better chance and easier to associate users’ pleasure with growing experience. Under globalization, consumers, oppositely, show the tendency of looking for personalized or localized products while these types of products seems have a greater competitive in marketing. This trendy illustrates that designing cultural product is a very important approach to a successful business. It is therefore designers have to go back to cultural issues, to redefine the meaning of product with cultural approach during product development stage. By embedding these cultural elements into products, consumers, then can experience cultural value when using them, where at the same time evoking their pleasure. In this study, the definition of pleasure is the positive emotion or pleasure evoked by perceiving the product or interacting with product. As mentioned, designers not only have to pay attention in functional creation, ergonomic satisfaction, product form development, but also to embed cultural characteristics into products. The question is how to design a product with pleasure since the pleasure emotion is a complex reactions process, which involves many complex factors. Among the emotional factors, cultural factors involve with cultural identity, taste, social value and so on. Take branding effect as an example, a dressing design using oriental cultural philosophy along with western aesthetic approaches expresses a mixture of western and eastern benefits in terms of deepen meaning and elegant appearance, which evoking consumers’ pleasure. The lacking of study in this issue leads to this further study. One of focus is on the study of affection of consumers’ pleasure towards cultural characteristics; and, hopefully the result can help designer in developing pleasurable products with culture in the future. It is therefore designing a cultural product has to understanding cultural factors and then transform them into design. However, this process needs to know and evaluate if the product carried out emotional value, which also can affect consumers’ pleasure instantly. Hence, to do assessment, it is required a reliable tool to measure pleasure. Although, the traditional psychological researches has been done some studies in this field, but only few focus on assessing tool towards to products. It is therefore the second focus of this study is to evaluate measurement tools related to products. There are two stages in this study: (1) the study of cultural characteristics evoking consumers’ pleasure. (2) The evaluation of pleasure measuring tool through literature review and re-evaluation of current tools, which including both psychological and physiological measuring tools towards pleasure. Finally, a reliable measuring tool will be suggested for the future application. The whole research takes two years to complete the study. At first year, the focus is to find cultural characteristics and identify the most significant cultural characteristics, which, later will be developed to stimuli for second year study through an experiment to evaluate measurement tools. Hence, the focus of second year is to conduct an experiment for the evaluation of current pleasure measuring tools. At the end, hopefully, the result can conclude a reliable measuring tool to assess pleasure.

Project ID:PE9709-0241
External Project ID:NSC97-2410-H182-015