The Expressiveness of Form: An Investigation of How a Product's Form Communicates

By Gabriel Ruegg

Locomotives look powerful. Hello Kitty is cute. No culture's members frown when they are happy or slouch when excited. Research suggests all humans share a common core of ability to perceive and interpret form. Artists use this common language—what T.S. Eliot called "objective correlatives"—to communicate feelings and ideas: music in minor keys sounds sad, and bounding dancers convey exuberance. Industrial design training, from the Bauhaus forward, has focused on teaching a 'visual grammar' while leaving students to discover the expressive qualities of form on their own. My thesis is an attempt to understand, and make explicit, the range of visual characteristics that communicate distinct emotions or meanings in the context of product design. Hopefully increased sensitivity to the expressive qualities of form, will ultimately lead to stronger, more coherent work.

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