Research in emotional design and kansei engineering has shown that aesthetics play a significant role in the appeal of a product. This paper contributes to establishing a methodology to identify the relationships between: perceptions, aesthetic features, desire to own and background of consumers. Surveys were conducted with 71 participants to gather their perceptions of 11 vase concepts. Advanced statistical analyses, including mixed models, were applied to allow generalisation of the results beyond the data sample. Significant relations between the desire to own a product and how the product is perceived were found (the desire to own was found to be related to beautiful, expensive, elegant, exciting, feminine, common and dynamic vases); as well as between the perceptions and the parameters describing the form of the vases (a vase was perceived as beautiful if it had many curved lines, was simple and tall). An automated mixed model analysis was conducted and revealed that general rules can be found between aesthetic features, perceptions and ownership, which can apply across gender and culture. The findings include design rules that link aesthetic features with perceptions. These contribute to research as guidelines for design synthesis and either be implemented via shape grammars or parametric modelling approaches. These rules are also interesting for 3D printing applications, especially important when the consumer is the designer. Some of these design rules are linked to the desire to own a product and they have implications for industry, they offer guidelines to creating attractive products that people want to own. Research in Engineering DesignNovember 2016 2 KEYWORDS Emotional design, kansei engineering, aesthetics, perception, product form and geometry.

The user experience of a product is recognized as having an increasing importance in particular in consumer products. Current approaches to designing user experiences are not easily translated to languages that a computer can understand. This paper examines a particular aspect of user experience, namely perception of the aesthetics of a product, to formalize this to rules, which are embedded into a tool to generate design. Investigating the perception of consumers is key to designing for their aesthetic preferences. Previous research has shown that consumers and designers often perceive the same products differently. This paper aims to embed rules on perception into a tool to support designers during design synthesis. Aesthetic design rules connecting perceptions with aesthetic features were integrated into a set grammar and a parametric modeling tool, and applied to the particular case of vases. The generated tool targeted the creation of vases with the perception of beautiful, elegant, and exciting. Results show that it is possible to generate beautiful, elegant, and exciting vases following the three aesthetic design rules, i.e., tall, simple, and curvy. The main contribution of this paper is the method used to incorporate information on perception into the set grammar and the parametric model. The tool is additionally proposed for supporting designers during design synthesis of shapes. The results are valid for vases but the method can be applied to other perceptions and product categories.

Tools to aid designers achieve specific perceptions through the aesthetics of their products are needed in order to compete and stand out in the current consumer society. This research aims to develop a spatial grammar to include perceptions. This is conducted through a case study where rules from previous research are used to guide the spatial grammar development and generation of solutions. Results show that it is possible to develop a spatial grammar to design for perception rules extracted from consumers using Semantic Differential (SD) scales and advanced statistics. These elements combined can generate a tool that provides designers with many new aesthetically pleasing solutions. The Spapper module within the FreeCAD software is used for the implementation. Initial work examines only two perception rules (simplicity and tall), and shows the need for the third (curves) to obtain the expected results. Future work should focus on expanding the shapes available for generation (i.e. 3D primitives) to include spheres, ellipsoids, tori, revolved profiles and sweeps, which could increase the number of valid solutions.