This paper presents a technique to investigate the influence of aesthetic features and brand recognition of vehicles. Visual aesthetics have been shown to impact greatly on consumer perception of products and their branding, yet there exist few tools or methods to support reasoning about their influence. To explore this influence, a procedure for visually decomposing designs into constituent aesthetic features is developed. The strategy is applied to a range of saloon cars, and a consumer survey undertaken to establish the significance and potency of individual aesthetic features. Results both validate the decomposition technique and highlight certain aesthetic features which have the greatest influence on brand recognition.

Product appearance and in particular its association with branding has been shown to play an increasingly important role in the commercial success of mature mass-market products. This paper presents a novel approach to analyse product appearance and explore similarities between products. The approach is applied to two contemporary industrial examples, smartphones and vehicles, and the outcome used to explore the strategic use of visual references to brand in product appearance. Results from the method's application validate the method in providing insights in terms of specific similarities in appearance. Further interpretation is then used to recommend possible design strategies with respect to the use of visual references to brand.

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The act of prototyping is more than the artefact produced -the process helps answer design questions. A knowledge of prototyping activities leads to better decisions in the design process. The aim of this paper is to characterise and compare prototyping techniques. A literature review explores current research into characterising prototypes, before highlighting the need for comparison. A study is reported that compares the design activity of sketching, CAD, cardboard and LEGO when used as prototypes in a group design task, showing differences in the levels of different design activities.