類比汽車正面造形於臉孔表情之探討

Abstract

汽車除了性能、功能等機能面因素，造形風格更是消費者喜好之重要要素。以往的研究亦時常探討受測者對汽車造形風格之主觀感受，以幫助設計師了解消費者之偏好及認知。然而先前的研究多是以一般產品所使用之感性語彙進行評估，如「復古」、「前衛」、「流線」、「幾何」等，但許多實例中皆可以發現汽車正面造形如同臉孔一般，亦常見以「臉孔表情」詞彙形容之文章，甚至也有不少把汽車正面視為是「臉孔」的設計案例，這些將汽車造形比喻為「臉孔表情」的例子確實普遍存在於生活周遭。因此，本研究將以不同於以往研究的角度切入，從「臉孔表情」意象探討汽車正面造形，期能提供設計師更多構想的面向。 本研究首先透過實例資料之收集，整理及分析相關重要案例並抽取重要的汽車樣本。接著進行訪談實驗，由8 位受測者將具代表性之樣本進行卡片法分類，並以放聲思考及回溯法記錄其口語資料，以口語分析建構受測者對汽車「臉孔表情意象」之認知經驗，並建立「臉孔表情」形容詞與造形特徵之關係。為驗證訪談之結果，本研究於最後進行問卷調查，以大量受測者進行車樣本對形容詞項目之評估，並提出其他由量化資料得來的結論。 研究結果提出25 個「臉孔表情意象」形容詞及4 個相關形容詞所對應的造形特徵，並部份以抽象圖片展現，以提供設計師作為構想之參考。另外實驗結果亦發現，「臉孔表情」形容詞不容易以一般表情分類項目整理，許多特別的表情在實驗中被抽取出來，本研究亦探究這些形容詞之相互關係；受測者對於「快樂」、「生氣」、「中性」三種表情提出頻次較高也較能鑑別差異，其他表情則相對較少被提及；而量化實驗與訪談實驗結果非常相似，驗證了訪談實驗之可信度，另外結果顯示性別及有無設計背景對於「臉孔表情意象」的認知並無影響。

In car design, in addition to the functions, style is also a critical factor that influences consumers’ favor. Many studies have discussed the consumers’ subjective points of view in car styling, and set up design guidelines for designers. However, most of the researchers use the evaluation adjectives for the conventional product design study to evaluate the cars, such as “ancient,” “modern,” “streamlined,” “geometric,” etc. But many examples in our daily life show that the front view design of cars are similar to faces and even present the analogies between facial expressions and the car fronts. In this research, three approaches were carried out via the concept of car’s “expressions.” The first step was to collect and analyze the related articles on websites and in magazines of car design communities, and pictures were chosen as samples among these cases. Second, card sorting experiments were conducted by 8 subjects individually with 40 car samples. Think aloud was applied simultaneously during this procedure and protocol analysis was followed to investigate the facial expressions concealed in these cars. Then, interviews were carried out to explore the subjective perspective from the participants towards the research topic. Finally, to verify the results of the protocal analysis, the questionnaire was applied by using the five-point Likert scale with amount of participants. This research finally submitted 25 facial expression adjectives and 4 related adjectives. The corresponding elements and features were also listed and presented by the front view contours. The results shows that the three expressions “happy,” “angry,” and “neutral” are the most common expressions used to describe cars while others are relatively less mentioned. Furthermore, many adjectives extracted are hard to be categorized into the basic expression categories. It appears that the basic facial expressions cannot fully cover the impressions of car front design. Therefore, the relation between the extracted adjectives was also discussed. Besides, the results of the questionnaire and the protocol analysis are quite similar, which verifies the reliability of both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The results also show that the perceptive differences of different backgrounds (design and non-design) and gender (men and female) are not significant both in factor analysis and Hotelling’s T2 test.