Students’ product perception: a cross-sectional analysis

Abstract

This paper reports a study that was conducted to analyze the differences in product design students’ perception of products. While product perception is reported as one of the competencies of product design students, our knowledge on the development of this competence via design education is limited. In order to address this gap, students studying at different levels of design education at a 4-year product design programme were asked to participate in a keyword assignment study. Students were distributed a pen to analyze and asked to assign keywords that they associate to this product. The analysis of the keyword preferences across years indicates an increase in the use of keywords related to instrumental function of products. While students prefer using fact/description based keywords in the early years of design education, they rely more on opinion-based keywords in the later years. Most of these opinion-based keywords are associated with the instrumental dimension. Thus, the data from this case indicates more focus on instrumentality in the contemporary product design education.