Formulating Guidelines for the Systematic Set-Up of Experiential Material Characterization Studies: A Case of Plastic Demonstrators

Abstract

Materials can be considered from a technical and experiential perspective. However, the latter perspective is more complex to study systematically. Four intertwined experiential levels describe the overall materials experience: sensorial, interpretive, affective, and performative level. Building upon the need in experiential material characterization for comparable physical material representations to enable within-material-class comparisons and the inclusion of extensive user aspects, this paper sums up the reasoning process regarding the understanding and design of an experimental set-up and its parameters of a specific case. The case objective is to formulate guidelines for the designer/researcher to set up experiential material characterization experiments with (i) plastic demonstrator forms and (ii) by consumers. Following elements are discussed: Assessors, Stimuli, Interaction Modalities, Dependent variables, Method, and Practical considerations. Next, future experiments can be carried out in order to generate holistic plastic material data on a larger scale, that can be collected in an experiential database and used by designers throughout the design process.