One of the greatest challenges in product development is creating a form that is attractive to an intended market audience. Functional product features are easier to test and verify through user surveys and consumer interactions. But, aesthetic preferences are as varied as the people that respond to these products. Currently, there is no technique that clearly and concisely quantifies aesthetic preference. The common methods use semantics like “strong” and “sexy”. A designer then needs to take the consumer’s desire for a certain aesthetic and translate that into a form that the consumer will find desirable. This translation is a gap in understanding that often is not crossed successfully, such as in the creation of the Pontiac Aztek. By providing the designer with a method for understanding and quantifying a consumer’s aesthetic preference for a product’s form, this gap can be closed. The designer would have concrete directions to use as a foundation for development of the product form. Additionally, the quantification of the aesthetics could be used by the designer as leverage when engineering and manufacturing decisions are made that might adversely affect the product form. This paper demonstrates how a qualitative attribute, like form, can be represented quantitatively. This quantification can be molded into a utility function which through design of experiments can be used to capture an individual’s preference for the indicated attributes. Once preference is summarized in the utility function, the utility function can be used as the basis for form generation and modification or design verification.

In the push for new vehicle designs, the distinctions between vehicle classes are quickly becoming blurred. We use shape grammars to quantify the differences between vehicle classes through the application of class-specific rules and the constraint of rule applications to within parametric ranges determined for each class. This allows for the development of new vehicle forms that clearly fall within a class or purposefully cross over the boundaries of classes and mix rules and ranges to create unique and interesting cross-over vehicles.

One of the greatest challenges in product development is creating a form that is aesthetically attractive to an intended market audience. Market research tools, such as consumer surveys, are well established for functional product features, but aesthetic preferences are as varied as the people that respond to them. Additionally, and possibly even more challenging, user feedback requires objective measurement and quantification of aesthetics and aesthetic preference. The common methods for quantifying aesthetics present respondents with metric scales over dimensions with abstract semantic labels like “strong” and “sexy.” Even if researchers choose the correct semantics to test, and even if respondents accurately record their responses on these semantic scales, the results on the semantic scales must be translated back into a product shape, where the designer must take the consumers’ numerical scores for a set of semantics and translate that into a form which consumers will find desirable. This translation presents a potential gap in understanding between the supply and demand sides of the marketplace. This gap between designer and user can be closed through objective methods to understand and quantify aesthetic preferences because the designer would have concrete directions to use as a foundation for development of the product form. Additionally, the quantification of aesthetic preference could be used by the designer as evidence to support certain product forms when engineering and manufacturing decisions are made that might adversely affect the aesthetics of the product form. This paper demonstrates how the qualitative attribute, form, cannot only be represented quantitatively, but also how customer preferences can be estimated as utility functions over the aesthetic space, so that new higher utility product forms can be proposed and explored. To do so, the form is summarized with underlying latent form characteristics, and these underlying characteristics are specified to be attributes in a utility function. Consumer surveys, created using design of experiments, are then used to capture an individual’s preference for the indicated attributes and thus the form. Once preference is summarized in the utility function, the utility function can be used as the basis for form generation and modification or design verification.

In new product development, quickly generating many product form concepts that a potential consumer prefers is a challenge. This paper presents the inaugural multiagent shape grammar implementation (MASGI) to automatically generate product form designs according to a preference function that can represent designer or consumer design preference. Additionally, the multiagent system creates a flexible shape grammar implementation that enables modifications to the shape grammar as the form design space changes. The method is composed of three subprocesses: a shape grammar interpreter that implements the shape grammar, an agent system that chooses which shape grammar rules to implement and the parametric design choices according to a preference function, and a preference investigator that determines the preference function, which constraints the automated form design process.

The measurement and understanding of user aesthetic preference for form is a critical element to the product development process and has been a design challenge for many years. In this article preference is represented in a utility function directly related to the engineering representation for the automobile headlight. A method is proposed to solicit and measure customer preferences for shape of the automobile headlight using a choice task on a main-effects conjoint survey design to discover and design the most preferred shape.