Exploring Types and Characteristics of Product Forms in Eliciting a User's Pleasure

Incorporating emotional value into products has become an essential weapon in increasing a product’s competitive edge in the consumer market. Consumers are especially drawn to products that look ‘pleasurable’. It is therefore important for product designers to understand ‘how’ a user’s emotion affects his/her appraisal of a product at the point of purchase, so that they can embed characteristics that evoke ‘pleasure’ into the product during the design process. Consequently, the aim of this study is to investigate the types and characteristics of product forms which can elicit a user’s pleasurable emotion during their visual appraisal process. An in-depth interview was conducted in order to collect the responses of pleasurable feelings from 22 participants. 19 stimuli were selected from 262 images and used for the interviews. Keywords from their answers were detected and used for content analysis. After examination, 15 characteristics that described the ‘pleasures’ of product form were found and categorized into 6 types of pleasurable form: Bios form, Cultural form, Aesthetic form, Decorative form, Unique form and Ideal form. The explanation of 6 types of pleasurable form and their characteristics and the discussion can provide designers a basic framework to develop pleasurable products