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Design and Mobility
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Introduction
It has been well established that consumers' perceptions of product forms can influence their purchasing decisions (Bloch 1995). Rather than focusing solely on objective information, people use heuristics based on the product form to make inferences about objective product attributes (Tversky & Kahneman 1974). For example, individuals made inferences about the flavor and quality of wine based on the shape of the wine bottle (MacDonald et al. 2008) and made environmentally conscious evaluations of cars based on car shapes (Reid, Gonzalez & Papalambros 2010; Reid, MacDonald & Du 2013). However, these researchers have not studied how these evaluations change or remain the same over time.
Researchers in design have conducted a significant number of shape-perception studies, especially in an automotive context. Many of these studies have focused on preference evaluations (Orsborn, Cagan & Boatwright 2009; Kelly et al. 2011; Reid et al. 2013; Orsborn, Cagan & Boatwright 2015) and semantic evaluations (Lai, Chang & Chang 2005; Reid et al. 2013; Orbay, Fu & Kara 2015), especially as they relate to sustainability considerations (Reid et al. 2010; Reid, Frischknecht & Papalambros 2012; Tseng et al. 2013; Sylcott, Orsborn & Cagan 2014; Goucher-Lambert & Cagan 2015). When developing new vehicles, an automotive designer needs to balance trade-offs between competing customer considerations (Burnap et al. 2016). This is especially true for sustainable-design considerations because customers often perceive environmentally conscious products as having lower quality (Goucher-Lambert & Cagan 2015). In an objective sense, sustainable design can lead to the improvement of one attribute at the expense of one or more others (Chen 2001), such as safety (which may be compromised due to excessive light-weighting of vehicles (Crandall & Graham 1989)) and performance (e.g., the rate of acceleration (Boyd & Mellman 1980) and the overall vehicle ride may decline (Crandall & Graham 1989)). Prior work by Tseng et al. showed that, on the basis of shape characteristics of cars, customers are able to make accurate inferences about objective measures regarding those cars (Tseng et al. 2013). However, the way in which customers' sustainability perceptions relate to their safety perceptions has not been studied systematically and in the context of automotive design.
To address these research gaps - that is, how customers' form-based evaluations change with...