The Study of Consumers’ Pleasures Evoked by Chair Aesthetic and Cultural Content

Title: The study of consumers’ pleasures evoked by chair aesthetic and cultural content Followed with the improvement of life standard, consumers demand a high quality of life. Hence, product design demands only focus on the function. It has to be able to attract users and further evoked pleasure design. Another words, traditional chair design tended to focus on ergonomic study and aesthetic representation. Few designs were focus on consumer emotional experience. According to the survey, the result showed that product with pleasure can get more attention from consumers. It is therefore designers should concern consumers using experience when doing designs. Contemporary chair designs are focusing on function and form, however, it seems to be lacking of meaning/ cultural content, which users can taste and talk about it. Being a designer, how to create a chair form embedding culture elements, which can make users feel pleasant. Hence, it is very important to have hands on experience onto chair appearance and meaning in design. This is the reason why this research tends to target this topic. There are many researcher are interested in this research topic. This has lead to the increasing of research papers. Among them, Jordan (1996) used pleasure to address the extensibility of traditional ergonomic. He believed that a pleasurable product has to accomplish function and usability and further evoking pleasure. He classified pleasure into four types: Physio-Pleasure, Socio-Pleasure, Psycho-Pleasure, Ideo-Pleasure. In addition, Norman (2004) stated that there are three levels of product emotions: visceral level, behavioral level, reflective level. Both theories emphasis the important of appearance and reflective level of emotion and seems worth to have further study. This study is focus on the study of consumers’ pleasure evoked by chair appearance and its cultural meaning. But, ignore the behavioral level of emotion, due to the research limitation. This study tends to focus on the appearance and cultural meaning. The research was started with photo collection. Later, some designers/and professional were invited to grad grouping product and further, intensity. To extract the most intensity emotion evoked by chair aesthetic and cultural factor, designers/and professional were asked to grouping and ranking all photos. Finally, the intensity pleasure photo is collected and used for deep interview. The pleasurable factor then is extracted and their intensity are distinguished by using statistic data test. The result of this study is hopefully can provide designers a reference when designing a chair.

Project ID:PE9907-2682
External Project ID:NSC99-2410-H182-026