Material perception and material identification in product design

Abstract : What makes designs intuitive? One essential part of it has to do with perception. The human body retrieves and processes information about its immediate surroundings at two levels: physical and perceptual. From the material engineer point of view, when a person interacts with a product, he (or she) interacts with the product and the materials simultaneously. The understanding of the perception mechanism of material’s surfaces provides leverage for the perceived quality of products. Our study focuses on the influence of the object identification context on the perception of materials, i.e. a context where the materials are embedded in an identified object or a context where the materials are presented as anonymous parts. These findings can be used in product design in that user experience can be tuned by promoting congruity between function, materials and object identity to favor understandability of the product. On the contrary user’s surprise can be promoted by favoring incongruity between these parameters.