FACTORIAL STRUCTURE OF EVALUATIONS OF AUTOMOTIVE INTERIOR MATERIAL TEXTURE

Abstract

This study implements a visual evaluation experiment of the textures of automotive interior materials to clarify the factors for various specifications of those textures. By using the semantic differential method to conduct a visual evaluation experiment. On a experiment, 17 automotive interior material samples; including "wood with wood grain", "metal with hairline", "metal pattern paint-courted plastic", "wood grain pattern film-coated plastic", "metal pattern film-coated plastic" and "piano black film-coated plastic" and 12 adjective pairs as evaluation items are used. Factor analysis reveals three evaluation factors ("warm", "deep" and "authentic"), and then, multiple regression analysis reveals that two main factors ("deep" and "authentic") influence the comprehensive evaluations of "high-grade", and three main factors ("warm", "deep" and "authentic") influence the comprehensive evaluation of "preferable". These factors should be useful for future developments, especially in the early design process, of automotive interior material textures. In addition, a "metal pattern film-coated plastic" sample has wood grain pattern characteristic which affect by hue is suggested.