Emotional Shape Generation System With Exchange of Others’ Viewpoints for Externalizing Customers’ Latent Sensitivity

The aesthetics of a product’s shape has become an important factor to increase the value of mature products. However, such emotional quality regarding the customer’s need is difficult to capture due to its subjectivity. To address this issue, we have previously proposed shape generation methods that help the customers to externalize their image of product aesthetics into a shape. The previous methods enable one to generate design samples that fit the customer’s conscious image of a product shape based on his/her fixed sensitivity. However, customers also have latent sensitivities of which they are not aware. In this paper, we propose a shape generation system that enables the user to exchange design solutions and viewpoints with others. The aim of sharing solutions is to evoke the latent sensitivities by showing the unexpected viewpoints of others. To generate design samples, we improve the previous system in which the users generate design samples based on favored features to which they pay attention. We conduct a shape generation experiment using the proposed system to verify the effectiveness of exchanging solutions and viewpoints with others. We compared the effectiveness of self-solutions, which are generated without the exchange, with co-solutions, which are generated with the exchange. The result suggests that the co-solutions are more likely to be effective as to their preference and unpredictable quality. We observed certain effective patterns in the design process: All co-solutions generated by referring to unpredicted topological shapes produced effective results. Using such shapes, the subjects are able to discover new viewpoints for the target design concept. The stated metaphorical viewpoints of others also help to introduce such new viewpoints.