Abstract
Nowadays, the marketplace is crowded with a plethora of products, many of which have an almost identical purpose. Furthermore, most products have a high level of engineering excellence and functional differences between them have become practically insignificant. Under this competitive situation, a crucial issue for designers attempting to create products is to meet specific needs and satisfy the feelings of consumers. Therefore, customer preferences should be included when making design decisions. Generally, customer preference criteria are dependent upon a number of interrelated factors, are vague and incorporate individual differences. The environments and circumstances in which customers live and use the products of their choice play a principle role in creating the above dependencies and individual differences concerning pre-conscious desires and preferences for particular relationships of color, shape, and other aesthetic factors. In order to facilitate design decision-making in this type of arena, this study proposes a method for evaluating images and codifying human impressions of products by using not only pairs of adjectives as criteria, but also environmental factors based on the Semantic Differential Method, and Principal Component Analysis.
