Auto Styling Prototype Category And Fitting Model

The styling of Modern products not only involves a tangible form, but alsocontains meaning of prototype---the category and scope of product, which isdetermined by the nature of human cognition. Apart from an explicit form, productstyling carries a lot of implicit meanings like intrinsic formal rules, relations andprinciples。This paper focuses on the prototype category of car styling and the constructionof fitting model, which involves domain knowledge from cognitive psychology,cognitive linguistics, artistic design and other related fields. The study of stylingprototype is a primary mission in the research field of design. The major task is toprobe the way how people process styling information, explore the information ofstyling, re-organize these information and then construct suitable model. As a highlysummary of certain kind of product styling,“styling prototype” reflects people’scognition of product category. It has to be state that category itself is not an aestheticjudgment, but the cognitive basis for aesthetic judgment. In this sense,"stylingprototype" does not paraphrase aesthetic issues, but is the most purely or essentialaspect design cognition.This research is granted by National Program on Key Basic Research Project(973Program). The main research methods include “literature research”,“descriptiveresearch”,“experimental analysis”,“statistical analysis” and etc. Four experimentsare conducted in this paper, which are the Car Type Information’s SemanticVocabulary Acquisition, the Test of SUV Typicality, the Representativeness SemanticScore Acquisition of SUV, and the Application for Assistant Design Sketch. Based onthese works, this study proposes the theoretical frameworks, model andrepresentational formula of car styling prototype category, and constructs the fittingmodel by analyzing the experiment data. In general, the paradigm of this study mainlyinvolves the theory and method of design research.The main research achievements and contributions of my research are as follow:On theories of prototype category: Firstly, with literature research anddescriptive research, and after analyzing category cognition and prototype category,this paper proposes the category radiation model and the prototype weight theory. Bydeducing the formula of prototype weight coefficient, this paper realizes thequalitative and quantitative representation of car styling prototype category. Secondly, with literature review on product form cognition and its process, this paper studies themode and significance of car styling prototype in the process of product formcognition from four cognition levels, which are the form physical level, theconsciousness level, the sensation level and the knowledge or experience level, thenproposes the form cognitive framework based on visual perception. Thirdly, based onprototype matching theory and spreading activation model, this paper proposes thespreading activation model of car type information. The model is a reasonable excuseor description of mode and character which is used for storing, activating, acquiringcar type information. Last but on least, after synthesizing experiment and statisticalanalysis, this paper completes the construction of car styling prototype category andfitting model, and proposes an assistant design methods base on styling prototype.On theories of prototype representation: Firstly, according to the character ofprototype and the six kinds of relevance of words’ concept, this paper divides the cartype semantic into defining semantic and representativeness semantic. Therepresentativeness semantic not only reflects the semantic feature of SUV but also theaesthetic differences of a type vehicle. Secondly, base on an analysis of car type, thispaper proposes a car styling prototype/category-oriented paradigm from three levelswhich are type, individual, feature. Through the correlation analysis of the test datainvolving population grouping, individual, statistics of recall, a SUV stylingprototype representation model is constructed.On studies of fitting model. a prototype-based and semantic-driven assistantdesign is accomplished, which is composed of fitting model and Semantic fitting.Upon testing, the design satisfies the demands of consistency and difference.Secondly, with the help of Alias, the assistant design exports three-dimension sketchwhich can be applied in the concept design phase of car styling.Both theory and practice show that prototype category is not only a reasonableexplanation to the product styling cognition, but also a method or tool for styling. So,the study has significant theoretical and practical meanings.