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Article Excerpt
When consumer products are on the market for a longer period of time, their technical specifications tend to become less and less varied and the importance of product design as an opportunity for differential advantage in the marketplace increases (Kotler, 2000; Urban & Hauser, 1993). Consequently, more attention will be paid to their aesthetic appeal. With regard to the aesthetic appeal of consumer products, the literature has reported effects of typicality, defined as 'goodness of example', on aesthetic preference (Veryzer & Hutchinson, 1998), while, at the same time, the attraction of novelty has been emphasized (Bianchi, 1998; Simonson & Nowlis, 2000). Since a preference for typical products seems incompatible with a desire for the new (e.g. Whitfield, 1983), the present study is designed to clarify how these two features jointly determine the aesthetic preference for human artefacts.
According to the preference-for-prototypes theory (Whitfield & Slatter, 1979), the more prototypical an object is, the more it will be aesthetically preferred. Empirical evidence for such a linear relation has been obtained for a variety of human artefacts, such as cubist paintings (Hekkert & van Wieringen, 1990), houses (Purcell, 1984), interior designs (Pedersen, 1986), musical performances (Repp, 1997), and consumer products (Veryzer & Hutchinson, 1998). Because, generally speaking, typicality will increase with familiarity, the preference-for-prototypes theory is compatible with Zajonc's mere exposure hypothesis that positive affect increases with repeated unreinforced exposure (Zajonc, 1968), and thus familiarity, of a stimulus. Bornstein (1989) conducted a meta-analysis of research testing Zajonc's hypothesis. He concluded that a significant, positive relationship exists between exposure frequency and reported affect (aesthetic preference) for all eight categories of stimuli used in the reviewed studies except one, which consisted of abstract paintings, drawings and matrices. Moderate through strong effects were obtained for photographs, meaningful words and polygon stimuli, whereas somewhat weaker effects were obtained for ideographs, nonsense-words and real person/object stimuli.
In an attempt to explain the mere-exposure effect Bornstein suggests that it is adaptive for adults to prefer the familiar over the novel, because some risk is inherent in any venture in the unknown. On the other hand, it is also adaptive, especially for children (e.g. Fantz, 1964; Richards, 1997), to seek out novel stimuli in that they facilitate learning. Bornstein therefore concludes that both preference for the familiar and preference for the novel have evolved into the behavioural repertoire.
With the concept of novelty a second factor being related to aesthetic appraisal has been introduced. The fact that the mere exposure effect could not be demonstrated for abstract paintings and drawings is well compatible with the fact that novelty is a very important feature in the appreciation of fine arts, where the striving for novelty is a dominant force in its development (Martindale, 1990) and originality is highly valued, especially among expert judges (Hekkert & van Wieringen, 1996a). In the case of these 'aesthetic' stimuli, a preference for familiar instances may thus be suppressed by a simultaneous preference for novel instances. Given the fact that consumer products, although functional and utilitarian, are often also perceived with an aesthetic attitude, i.e. its aesthetic properties are deemed important, the same two variables may play a role in the aesthetic appreciation of these objects.
At this point it is important to emphasize that, in spite of the fact that typicality (in terms of 'goodness of example') will tend to correlate substantially with familiarity, the latter variable should not be construed as a single defining characteristic of typicality (Barsalou, 1985; Loken & Ward, 1990). It is logically possible that an instance of a category will be rated as more novel (or less familiar) than another one without being judged as a less good example of the category in question. The degree to which typicality and novelty will covary is an empirical question, and will depend on the object features taken into account when judging the two characteristics. Take for example Philippe Starck's table lamp (Fig. 1) that can be designated as novel because of its synthetic material, while, at the same time, it can be seen as a typical table lamp due to its overall form. Therefore, typicality and novelty are not to be conceived as opposite poles of one and the same continuum, although a high (negative) correlation will often be found.
Based on the above considerations it was hypothesized that aesthetic preference will be determined by the joint influence of typicality and novelty. Since the two variables will be negatively related, the positive effect of increasing typicality will be counteracted by the concomitant decrease of novelty, whereas the positive effect of increasing novelty will in its turn be limited by a concomitant decrease of typicality. Therefore, our hypothesis implies that both novelty and typicality will be positively related to aesthetic preference when the counteracting influence of these concomitant changes in the other variable is controlled for.
STUDY I
In Study 1, the latter hypothesis was tested with respect to consumer products. To that effect, the relation between novelty and typicality on the one hand and aesthetic preference on the other hand was investigated in three experiments with different product categories. The categories varied in the extent to which their aesthetic appeal is considered an important design feature, namely sanders (aesthetic appeal not important), telephones and singing teakettles (aesthetic appeal important).
Method
Participants
The three product categories were rated by three different groups of respectively 28(14 males and 14 females), 24 (12 males and 12 females), and 27 (13 males and 14 females) participants. The first two groups were recruited from the student population of Delft University of Technology (age range from 18 to 27 years) and the third group from Delft's general population (age range from 20 to 40 years).
Procedure
In...
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