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Bluntzer, Jean-Bernard (1); Ostrosi, Egon (2)

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Abstract:

In the modern automotive industry, a car?s style clearly defines its brand. In the context of globalization, a question has recently emerged concerning the relationship between a country's culture and the car style of a particular brand. The style is one way to place car morphologies into a meaningful structure, called the ?telling structure.? This research hypothesizes that a stylist tries to compress a car?s form and make it a refined unicum that is streamlined with some inherent features, which express a brand?s cultural aesthetics. Using the cognitive paradigm that an end user transforms explicit references into implic-it references and that the telling structure of a car?s design features influences the recognition of the brand, this research demonstrates a novel method to ad-dress this hypothesis. Results from this study show that there is a relationship between the brand?s country of origin and the perceived recognition of a car. However, a country's brand culture is not always represented by the style of the cars. In particular, the results indicate that some cars can actually lose their cultural identity, especially in the context of a worldwide market.

Keywords:

Emotional design, User centred design, Human behaviour in design, Automotive styling, Design cognition