Aesthetic Pleasure in Design
Putting product design in context: Consumer responses to design fluency as a function of presentation context
Laura K. M. Graf, Jan R. Landwehr
Goethe University, Germany
lgraf@wiwi.uni-frankfurt.de
Keywords: aesthetic liking, design fluency, product presentation, advertising
Abstract
Existing research has well established that the fluency of mentally processing a design is an important determinant of consumers’ aesthetic liking. Yet, to date, most studies have assessed consumers’ reactions to design fluency in isolation, i.e., irrespective of the context in which the design is presented. In reality, however, consumers usually perceive a design in a context. Against this background, this research examines how a design’s fluency and the visual context in which it is presented interact to affect aesthetic liking of bikes, chairs and lamps. To this end, we experimentally manipulate design typicality as an operationalization of design fluency and the usualness of an advertisement’s background as an operationalization of presentation context. The pattern of results suggests that the effect of design fluency on aesthetic liking differs in unusual versus usual presentation contexts, which is in accordance with a dual process model of fluency-based aesthetic preferences.
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Cite this paper: Graf, L and Landwehr, J (2016). Putting product design in context: Consumer responses to design fluency as a function of presentation context. Proceedings of DRS 2016, Design Research Society 50th Anniversary Conference. Brighton, UK, 27–30 June 2016.
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