Abstract
Design aesthetics is playing an important role in design education, as well as design practice. Certain biological signals can reveal people’s attitudes toward design works. This study used eye movement data to examine the effect of design aesthetics and professional background on viewing strategies of design proposals. Participants were asked to observe 12 excavator design proposals while their eye movement data were recorded. Experiment was designed and conducted. Through a series of statistical analyses, the results showed that design aesthetics had main effect on dwell time and fixation count in different areas of interest. The most appealing design proposals obtained more fixations and longer duration than the unappealing ones. Besides, professional background significantly influenced the scan paths of design proposals. The comparison of viewing sequences showed that industrial design students were more flexible, while engineering students followed the similar viewing sequence.
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This project was sponsored by Grant no. 17YJC760015 from the MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences, and Grant no. LGF18G010001 from the Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang province.
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Hou, G., Lu, G. The influence of design proposal viewing strategy: design aesthetics and professional background. Int J Technol Des Educ 29, 543–564 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10798-018-9450-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10798-018-9450-7