Ebook An innovative approach to the aesthetic design
Styling is a creative activity where the designer’s goal is to define a product that evokes a certain emotion while satisfying the imposed constraints. Therefore, a better understanding of human reactions can allow an easier satisfaction of market wishes and tastes. On the other hand, the complete design of new products requires multidisciplinary expertise and consequently it results from the collaboration of several actors. It is then clear that the formalization of the design intent underlying the product specification may improve the communication quality among the involved actors, who can belong to different departments in the same company, e.g. styling and engineering, or to external suppliers.
In addition the formalization of the relationships between shape and aesthetic character included in a computer system may help designers to achieve their goal more directly. In fact, even if the introduction of digital tools in the styling workflow in the last twenty years has significantly shortened the development time and costs, some critical issues have still to be faced and overcome to move towards an ideal optimised digital design process, in which the design intent is automatically communicated and preserved throughout all the process phases.
When designers create shapes with digital techniques often the available tools for model definition and manipulation restrict the way in which a shape can be modelled: they often have to concentrate too much on how to use the system to obtain what they have in mind. To make the modelling process more intuitive, the interaction should be performed through a direct control over the three-dimensional space in the same way a pencil dominates the two-dimensional space. In fact, an easy interaction requires functionalities simulating the traditional method of stylists’ work.
The current limitations are mainly due to the fact that the modelling activity is mostly based on low-level geometric elements. Often it is necessary a full understanding of the underlying surface representation to know which elements have to be changed to obtain the wished surface modifications On the contrary the user would like to directly handle properties strictly linked with his design intent.
Based on these considerations, the European project FIORES-II (GRD1-1999-10785-Character Preservation and Modelling in Aesthetic and Engineering Design) FIORES-II), aims at building innovative CAD tools more adhering to the creative user mentality and at improving the cooperation between the main actors involved in the product development process, by identifying the relationship between shape geometry and aesthetic character. The goal of this paper is to illustrate the project objectives and intermediate results. It is structured as follows: in the first part a survey of the main research works studying links between shape and aesthetics is given; part two describes the FIORES-II project objective and presents the results achieved until now. Conclusion can be found in part three.
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