Product Experience

Hendrik N. J. Schifferstein, Paul Hekkert

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780080450896
• eBook ISBN: 9780080556789
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Product Experience brings together research that investigates how people experience products: durable, non-durable, or virtual. In contrast to other books, the present book takes a very broad, possibly all-inclusive perspective, on how people experience products. It thereby bridges gaps between several areas within psychology (e.g. perception, cognition, emotion) and links these areas to more applied areas of science, such as product design, human-computer interaction and marketing. The field of product experience research will include some of the research from four areas: Arts, Ergonomics, Technology, and Marketing. Traditionally, each of these four fields seems to have a natural emphasis on the human (ergonomics and marketing), the product (technology) or the experience (arts). However, to fully understand human product experience, we need to use different approaches and we need to build bridges between these various fields of expertise. - Most comprehensive collection of psychological research behind product design and usability - Consistenly addresses the 3 components of human-product experience: the human, the product, and the experience - International contributions from experts in the field

Part 1

From the Human Perspective

Outline

Chapter 1: ON THE VISUAL APPEARANCE OF OBJECTS

Chapter 2: THE TACTUAL EXPERIENCE OF OBJECTS

Chapter 3: THE EXPERIENCE OF PRODUCT SOUNDS

Chapter 4: TASTE, SMELL AND CHEMESTHESIS IN PRODUCT EXPERIENCE

Chapter 5: MULTISENSORY PRODUCT EXPERIENCE

Chapter 6: HUMAN CAPABILITY AND PRODUCT DESIGN

Chapter 7: CONNECTING DESIGN WITH COGNITION AT WORK

Chapter 8: DESIGNING FOR EXPERTISE

A

Senses

Outline

Chapter 1: ON THE VISUAL APPEARANCE OF OBJECTS

Chapter 2: THE TACTUAL EXPERIENCE OF OBJECTS

Chapter 3: THE EXPERIENCE OF PRODUCT SOUNDS

Chapter 4: TASTE, SMELL AND CHEMESTHESIS IN PRODUCT EXPERIENCE

Chapter 5: MULTISENSORY PRODUCT EXPERIENCE

1

ON THE VISUAL APPEARANCE OF OBJECTS

HAROLD T. NEFS, University of St. Andrews, Scotland, UK

Publisher Summary

When looking around in the world, humans have to figure out what it is they see, what the shapes of things are, what kinds of materials they are made of, and what their potential uses or dangers are. In addition to meaning, aesthetic value or affordance, the visual system also extracts some more fundamental object properties. The position, that perceived object shape is determined exclusively by the objects’ physical shape, is therefore clearly untenable. Likewise, perceived material and perceived illumination characteristics are also not determined exclusively by their respective physical counterparts. The problem of what objects look like is certainly not a trivial problem. It determines whether people approach an object carefully or not, if and how they pick it up, etc. This chapter examines the difficulties that humans face when looking at the real world. It examines the perceived shape, material properties, and illumination of objects with special emphasis on the perceived shape. There are physical relationships between shape, material, and illumination once certain simple assumptions are made. This chapter provides the necessary theoretical background on the physical properties and relationships between shape, material, and illumination of objects in projection. It discusses the physical correlates for perceived object properties. It also discusses perceptual organization and whether perceived object properties conform to physical constraints, that is, whether they form a coherent set. In addition it discusses how additional cues can be used to form a coherent percept.

1 ON VISUAL APPEARANCE

1.1 Introduction

When looking around in the world, humans have to figure out what it is they see, what the shapes of things are, what kind of materials they are made of, and what their potential uses or dangers are. In addition to meaning, aesthetic value or affordance, the visual system also extracts some more fundamental object properties. Examples include the shape, size, glossiness, and lightness of an object. Counter-intuitively maybe, these aspects of the percept are not objective qualities because they are constructed in and by the human mind. Some of them have obvious correlates in the physical world, but this is often not the case. For example, objects might look flatter when they are made from a different material (e.g. Khang, Koenderink and Kappers, 2003; 2004). The position, that perceived object shape is determined exclusively by the objects’ physical shape, is therefore clearly untenable. Likewise, perceived material and perceived illumination characteristics are also not determined exclusively by their respective physical counterparts. The problem of what objects look like is certainly not a trivial problem. It determines whether people approach an object carefully or not, if and how they pick it up, etc. In this chapter we examine the difficulties that humans face when looking at the real world. In particular we will examine the perceived shape, material properties, and illumination of objects with special emphasis on the perceived shape.

A question that has inspired and frustrated many scholars over the last few millennia is why objects look the way they do. In the ancient Greek tradition it was thought that objects send out exact little copies of themselves to the eyes where they are mysteriously inspected by the mind (Howard, 2002). Aristotle, however, rejected the idea that objects emitted substance to the eyes, and he clearly had the idea of the rectilinear propagation of light. Although this seems quite obvious from our modern vantage point, for a very long time it was not properly understood how image formation in the eye was accomplished. In our modern understanding we know that an image of the world is projected onto the back of the eyes where it is further processed and transported to the brain through the optic nerve. The visual image is a two-dimensional projection of the three-dimensional world on the retina. In spite of the fact that the depth dimension is lost in the process, humans report a clear impression of a three-dimensional world. Somehow the brain reconstructs the world from what is only available in a degenerate two-dimensional projection.

The main problem for vision lies in the fact that for any visual image there are an infinite number of possible objects that give rise to the same image. This ambiguity not only lies in the fact that the depth dimension is lost in the projection onto the two-dimensional retina, but also in the materials that the object is made of and how the object is illuminated. At first sight, the reconstruction of the world in the mind is thus an impossible task. However, if the visual system were to use some assumptions about the world, and constraints in the way it reconstructs the world, the task becomes much more manageable. Some of the assumptions that one can make about the world are very powerful in constraining the number of possible solutions, while still maintaining a high predictive power in the physical world. For example, it is reasonable to assume that what is smoothly connected in the visual image is also smoothly connected in physical space. It is a highly coincidental situation indeed that two unconnected surface patches still form a smoothly connected patch in the visual image. It is more likely that an area of constant luminance, or a smoothly changing area, corresponds to a single, smoothly connected surface in physical space and that an area with a sharp transition indicates two separate surfaces. Obviously, the more assumptions one makes, the further the class of possible surface solutions is restricted. However, the chance that the reconstructed object is not accurate also increases with each additional assumption.

Before we can begin to understand how objects are perceived, we need to know about the physical behavior of objects. How they reflect light, and what the descriptors of shape are that can be used. In other words, what kind of information about the depth dimension is preserved in the projection from a three-dimensional object to a two-dimensional retinal image? A pattern in the retinal image can only be an effective cue to the three-dimensional shape if it has a causal relationship with the real shape of the physical object. In order to understand how the physical world is represented in the mind, one thus needs to study the physical properties of objects under projection. From our knowledge of the physical behavior of objects we might be able to derive potential cues for the visual system to derive a three-dimensional reconstruction of the world. The idea that the observer is inextricably linked with its environment was very fashionable at times in the twentieth century. Gibson (1966), for example, stated that an understanding of the physical properties of the world is essential for understanding perception.

Once the physics of object properties is sufficiently clear for its present purpose, the question can be raised of what physical correlates perceived object properties have. It is clear that the perceived shape of things must correspond sufficiently reliably to the physical shape otherwise the percept would be quite useless. However, th...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• PREFACE
• LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
• INTRODUCING PRODUCT EXPERIENCE
• Part 1: From the Human Perspective
• Part II: From the Interaction Perspective
• Part III: From the Product Persperctive
• CLOSING REFLECTIONS
• INDEX