Labs for Design & Business

My observation suggests that some consumers do not make good decisions in terms of design. For instance, they choose bad paintings, bad wines, bad interior products, bad clothings, and so on. I wonder if education or training improves their taste or their ability to identify well-designed products. Indeed, Reber, Schwartz, and Winkielman (2004) suggests that beauty evaluation can be trained by exposing to an object more often.

I further argue that a critical skill that needs to be trained is to appreciate the (positive-negative) value of interactions among more than two components within an object. For instance, they must know whether a specific shape and color of a figure in a painting goes well with another figure, whether the bitterness of a wine goes well with its sweetness, and whether red muffler goes well with brown boots, etc.

There is much evidence that people pay attention to interactions and they evaluate a product highly when a positive interaction was identified. For instance, when consumers make a purchase decision about a stereo component, they consider “ensemble”: when the stereo component goes with other interior products that consumers previously purchased, it is more likely to be purchased than when it does not go with others (Bell, Holbrook, and Solomon 1991; Holbrook and Anand 1992). Consumers also prefer a product whose various form features are “consistent” over a product whose form features are not (Veryzer and Hutchinson 1998), suggesting that the value of interaction is elaborated and supported by the works based on Gestalt theory.

Then, I raise questions:  (1) how do we test whether a specific consumer is able to distinguish between a good interaction (harmony) and a bad interaction, and (2) how do we train them to distinguish good and bad interactions?