CAD TOOLS BASED ON AESTHETICH PROPERTIES

The market success of industrial products strongly depends on their aesthetic appearance. Therefore a better understanding of customer wishes and response can improve the appreciation of new products. At the same time, the formalisation of the link between emotional reactions and products' basic geometric elements could enable the development of CAD tools that makes faster the achievement of the designer aims. A preliminary step toward this is the comprehension of the procedures designers follow to impress the desired character to the product. This includes the understanding of which elements and properties are evaluated and how are modified. In the paper we present some outcomes in this direction. They result from an analysis of the design activities carried out by stylists and surfacer(CAS/CAD operators) both in the automotive field (BMW, Pininfarina, Saab), and in household supplies field (Alessi and Eiger), done within the European Project FIORES-II (Character Preservation and Modelling in Aesthetic and Engineering Design). In particular, some of the identified aesthetic properties, used to judge the shape, and the operators acting on them are discussed