Abstract

It is essential to reflect the strategic connotations of the brand on the products while creating and developing a product design that fits the brand identity. Therefore, for a company, it is a critical issue to place the right messages that support the strategic brand identity in the design elements. From the designers' point of view, they are expected to have design skills such as analyzing a brand's uniqueness and brand knowledge and reflecting the results of these analyses on the aesthetics, function and overall meaning of the product. For this reason, as a part of the Industrial Design curriculum, brand identity focused product design has been restructured in Atılım University, Industrial Design program. In this studio course, the aim was for design students to acquire skills of brand identity and product identity analysis, in addition to basic design knowledge and skills. During 16 weeks, the data were collected by doing a participant observation and conducting semi-structured interviews with the course students. The data gathered from the semi-structured interviews and participant observation were analysed by using an inductive coding approach. Thus, product design suggestions that were suitable for the identity of the brand were analysed with the questions asked by the instructors during the design process. The results show that the questions asked by the instructors and the examples they gave, led the students to research, think, question, understand and make sense of the importance of information. As a result, the students obtained design outputs suitable for brand identity.

Highlights

  • The semantic dimension of product design is becoming more critical in advanced product categories where technical differences between products are diminishing

  • The analysis indicates that product design concepts that were appropriate for the brand's identity were scrutinized using the questions asked by the instructors during the design process

  • 5.Conclusion and Discussion When the existing studies were examined, it was seen that there are design studio course setups focused on training industrial design students for the product design sector (Egan, 2021; Parmentier et al, 2021; Swanson, 2020; Meyer and Norman, 2020; Redström, 2020; Frascara, 2020)

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Summary

Introduction

The semantic dimension of product design is becoming more critical in advanced product categories where technical differences between products are diminishing. Product design shifts towards communicative product attributes that represent the symbolic domain of the product (Karjalainen, 2003a; Stompff, 2010). Placing strategic associations in products is essential when creating and developing product design that fits the brand identity (Karjalainen, 2003b). In advanced product categories, where technical differences between products are reduced, the focus shifts to communicative product attributes representing the product's symbolic domain (Karjalainen, 2003a). Communicative qualities are often intertwined with a specific set of meanings that refer to the brand represented by the product (Homburg, Schwemmle, & Kuehnl, 2015). For a company, it is a crucial issue to place the right messages that support the strategic brand identity in the design elements

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