Understanding products
Our Range of Research Services
Our Range of Research Services
Products are crystallisation objects processing shape, function and meaning into daily life and cultural lifestyle design. Their material basics as information for our senses is ancient. Now, with more virtual objects, major product categories get revamped or re-invented. As with autonomous and new energy automobiles, as with connected health care devices.
Products are the essential productive forces for developing life, from functionality devices, childhood companions to lifestyle design creators. Products are “alive” with human qualities. Every child playing with a toy shows this innate vital world modeling relationship.
In the current culture of permanent change, consumers themselves tend to proceed in a “morphing” mode, they want to develop and look for products that beyond their usage benefits play a meaningful role in their life. Products are like crystallization objects helping defining their identity and their statements build the relationships to the matching social groups and their cultural codes. And with increasing design message charging of daily life, people are savvy in their design style staging choice strategies.
Their material basics are information for our senses is engrained heritage. Juxtaposing to this, the progressing digitalization is both, de-materializing the objects, and also the relationship of customers to objects and their brands. New product categories, and in our work areas e.g. new energies, autonomous cars or connected health care devices are shaping new ways of life, feeling and thinking.
Product design is strongly influential because it is tangibly present, of direct impact and because you can personally judge it. In the moment you enter the sphere of a product, a dynamic relationship starts: you experience the product’s logic using it and you sense it physically. For example with cars, in a small interior you pull yourself in, in a SUV interior you puff yourself out and feel enthroned.
The material sensual grammar is the base for a product to impart this inherent logic relationship. Feel, smell, sound, surface qualities, materials, looks and handling together are the “atoms” of the product character. Product logic functions automatically and subconsciously and as part of the identity crafting dialogue. This dynamic is additionally meaningfully loaded with cultural and socio-demographic values.
It is clear: design in its basic sense touches our lives. This direct dialogue is one reason why consumers engage and feed back their experiences to communities or to the brands.
Our work for product development and marketing covers the whole research spectrum. From the smallest details of the sensorial-tangible product design dimension, usage and usage motivations, brand positioning to storytelling concept evaluations.
Understanding the soul and psychological impact grammar of products has been one of our core activity areas.
With our joined design analysis and psychological Morphology approach we an tangibly point out which effects and impacts product design and functionality cause, which effects are strategically decisive.
These insights show exactly how the product properties configure and stags brand values, and at the other end, shapes customer usage motives and enhances identity, lifestyle and and cultural value codes.
It is not about changing details consumers don’t like at face-value, but about the mechanisms at work and recommendations based on and validated from their impact on usage motives and cultural value context.