Expressing product character: teaching design students how to exploit formâs parameters
Year: 2013
Editor: John Lawlor, Ger Reilly, Robert Simpson, Michael Ring, Ahmed Kovacevic, Mark McGrath, William Ion, David Tormey, Erik Bohemia, Chris McMahon, Brian Parkinson
Author: Ferraris, Silvia Deborah; Gorno, Roberta
Series: E&PDE
Institution: Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Section: Styling/Form
Page(s): 370-375
ISBN: 978-1-904670-42-1
Abstract
Defining productsâ aesthetic characteristics in terms of shape properties can represent a challenge for design students and sometimes for design professionals too. Outlining aesthetic features of products is indeed a relevant activity since it affects product understanding and meaning together with its underlying expressive character. It often happens that design students exclusively lean on their sensitivity to fulfil this task without having a critical core competence of form-giving. Moreover, during the educational activity within a Master Course in Product Design, a lack of commonly shared vocabulary to define productsâ aesthetic characteristics was noted by the team of researchers. A design exercise was therefore arranged that stemmed from a previous research about form-giving, form parameters, productsâ character. The first activity consisted in the selection and definition of parameters that can be used for the description of objectsâ forms. Then, an educational activity was defined to let design students apply these notions to their work, basing on Active Learning approach. In the activity here presented, this skill is rehearsed through two steps. During the first phase students individually applied the parameters to very basic and abstract models. In the second phase, students were asked to shape a product that had to convey a given character, challenging them in applying abstract notions of form and surface parameters onto an actual product. This way, the connection between form-surface parameters and characters was highlighted. The novelty of this case consists into the effort of building a straight connection between the abstract learning of formal concepts and the design oriented approach to the issue. Examples of results and feedbacks from students will be reported.
Keywords: Product character, form generation, form parameters