Computer Aided Design (CAD) has been crucial to the engineering design process since the 1960s due to the ability to create 2D and 3D design representations and easily incorporate design changes without the cost of physical prototypes. However, CAD is hindered by its hardware displaying 3D objects as 2D representations, causing a loss of realism compared to a physical prototype. This paper seeks to observe if increasing the realism of interaction between subjects and virtual prototypes using virtual reality hardware will affect users ability to analyze the assembly model for errors. For this end, an experiment asked participants to perform a design review of assembly models and determine if they successfully form a cube without deformations or voids in four different environments. The environments ranged from low to high levels of immersion controlled through the use of two factors: movement of user’s point of view and assembly rotation. It is expected the highly immersive VR environment will allow for improved assembly reviews due to the increased realism of the virtual prototype.
Birkhoff proposed that order divided by complexity is a formula for esthetic measurement. In that context, this work proposes to measure order with a method to quantify Gestalt principles in 2D product representations. These principles establish how humans visually group elements of a shape together, and they have been used in architecture, product design and art as guidelines for a good design. A human subject study was conducted to test the hypothesis that if complexity is held constant across different versions of the same basic concept, Gestalt can serve as a direct measurement of the relative esthetics of those candidate designs. In a survey, subjects were asked to evaluate their preferences for multiple individual 2D representations of automotive wheel rims from a variety of styles. The wheel rims within each style were designed in pairs, one pair with lower and one pair with higher Gestalt. Complexity was held constant by only comparing subject ratings within wheel rim styles. The results show that a positive change in Gestalt has a positive effect on aesthetic subject preference and that preferences are not significantly different for designs differing in geometry but having the same Gestalt. The implications of these results for designers and for future work are discussed.
This work introduces a methodology to quantify the form of a three-dimensional (3D) product representation using the Gestalt principles of symmetry, parallelism, and continuity, and how they can be used as descriptive parameters in product design. First, consistent quantifications of these three Gestalt principles for parametrized 3D representations in a zero-one scale are presented. Then, a generalized methodology applicable to any product form is discussed. It starts with the identification of important aesthetic forms of the product shape and the Gestalt principles that best related to those forms, and ends with the quantification of these Gestalt principles of a 3D product representation. The expressions to quantify the Gestalt principles in question are validated through an online survey in which subjects indicated how much they recognize symmetry, parallelism, or continuity from irregular shapes. Finally, random-effects ordered logit regression is used to determine if the expressions effectively describe the level of recognition of each Gestalt principle. Results show that the proposed quantifications for symmetry, parallelism, and continuity are congruent with subjects perception of these Gestalt principles, and the implications for designers and future work are discussed. Further implications in the design process of these quantifications include the optimization of the product shape for aesthetic, semantic, and functional goals.
Gestalt principles have previously served as qualitative guidelines for good visual design in art, architecture, and product design. This paper introduces a formal method to quantify classical Gestalt principles (proximity, continuity, closure, symmetry, parallelism, and similarity) for two-dimensional product representations. With the approach, designers use their judgment to divide a 2D representation of a new concept or existing design into its key atomistic elements, identify the most appropriate Gestalt principles that apply to the grouping of those elements, and then can objectively quantify the design’s adherence to those principles using mathematical functions of the design parameters. This quantification provides a tool to augment a design team’s own subjective interpretations in evaluating and communicating a product’s visual appearance at any stage of or throughout the design process.
Reaching a balance between product form and function is one of the main challenges of design teams. When users make choices among products with similar functionality and price, esthetics becomes a decisive factor, and understanding how they are perceived through the product form can allow designers to create new designs with more appealing shapes. Gestalt principles explain how subjects group elements of a shape and devise them as a whole, and recent research has proposed their quantification for evaluation of esthetics. This work examines a previous methodology to quantify Gestalt principles of 2D product representations, in particular, expressions to measure the principles of symmetry, parallelism, and continuity are applied to parameterized forms, with a generic bottle silhouette as case study. First, the representation is divided into key atomistic elements, which are generated through cubic Bézier curves. Then, the quantifications of symmetry, parallelism, and continuity, in conjunction with gradient-based optimization, are used on these forms to generate bottle silhouettes with combinations of high and low levels of each principle. The resulting designs were submitted to a discrete choice study in which respondents selected the bottle silhouettes they found more appealing. The preference data were analyzed with both fixed and random coefficients multinomial logistic regression (mixed logit) to determine the part-worth utility of each Gestalt principle over esthetic preferences. In conclusion, the results show differences in the utility estimates of symmetry, parallelism, and continuity, and implications for designers are discussed.
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