Function and Aesthetics of a Product in Segmentation of the Sketch

Abstract

Understanding the central characteristics of product design before studying the sketches of products is an essential task. It is well established in design research that sketches are the most important communication tool in the conceptual stage of the design process. However, recent studies have shown that the interaction between functionality and aesthetics influences the customer’s emotional connection with the product. Furthermore, sketch segmentation has been considered a fundamental step towards the understanding of sketches, and this problem has never been tackled from a design perspective. This paper presents a novel perspective on the problem of product sketch segmentation by proposing two different segmentation procedures. First, a low-level segmentation procedure is proposed, in which Gestalt theory was applied to group the sketch elements into larger components based only on their visual arrangement and no prior-knowledge is required on the product. Second, a high-level segmentation process is proposed considering the prior-knowledge of the functional aspects of the product representation on the grouping of the sketch elements. Results of the two procedures applied to the same sketches indicated that the low-level segmentation procedure, which requires less cognitive burden, can lead to components with specific well-defined functions as obtained through the high-level segmentation procedure.