formlanguageandstyledescription.pdf

Form language and style description Kuohsiang Chen, Department of Industrial Design, National Cheng Kung University, 1 University Road, Tainan, Taiwan, ROC Charles L. Owen, Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, 10 West 35th Street, Chicago, IL 60616, USA This paper presents a 'style description framework' for the analysis of style as it is exhibited by objects, artifacts and, particularly, products. The framework equips a designer with both the ability to analyse existing style~ and to describe new styles for target markets. A 'style profile' consists of a set of polar adjective scales and associated weighting mechanisms. Within the profile, stylistic attributes -- in the form of values given on the scales -- are grouped into six categories: form elements, joining relationships, detail treatments, materials, colour treatments and textures. Two weighting mechanisms, an importance index and confidence factor, fine-tune the description. The style profile can be used .not only to communicate styles between designers and computers, b~t also to accumulate formal style knowledge. © 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd. Keywords: aesthetics, product design, computer aided design, form language 1 Doblln, J 'Discrimination: the special skills requin~ for seeing, and the curious structure of judgement' Design Processes Newsletter, Vol 2, No 4. Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, 1987, 1-6 ,, ) - ELSEVIER A ll man-made environments and artifacts have styles -- no matter what their creator's intention -- because formal, visual styles are created by particular sets of the formal elements that are also the constituent components of all visible forms. Designers, as designated 'form-givers', are expected to understand the workings of this process and to use this knowledge to give sensitive, intentional style to the artifacts they design. Doblin 1 expresses the belief that high level discriminators (designers, e.g. Gropius, Moholy-Nagy, Mies van der Rohe, Eames, Vignelli, Chermayeff, Rand, Nizzoli, Bill, Rams, etc.) have the ability to both recognize styles and think in systems. This suggests that the experience and expertise required to create styles and discriminate taste are both accumulatable and extractable. This paper (1) investigates the definitions and usage of styles in various fields to determine the essence of formal styles and (2) proposes a style 0142-694X/97 $17.00 Design Studies 18 (1997) 249-274 PII: S0142-694X(97)00002-1 © 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd All rights reserved Printed in Great Britain 249 2 Stein, J end Berg Flexner, S (eds) The Random House thesaurus college edition Ran- dom House, New York (1990) p. 696 3 Enkvist, N E 'On defining style: an essay in applied linguis- tics' in J Spencer (ed) Linguis- tics and style Oxford University Press, London (1964) p 28 description framework capable of equipping the designer with both the ability to analyse existing styles and to describe new styles for target mar- kets. Ultimately, this framework can also be used to communicate styles between designers and computers, and to accumulate formal style know- ledge. 1 The essence of formal styles Formal style is a key factor which differentiates consumer markets. Design- ers understand this and work to develop skill in handling the subtleties of formal styles. Style is a key subject for design and has been since design became a profession -- the recent debate on nationalism vs globalism in industrial design is yet another manifestation of the continuing discussion. The intent of this research is to explore the nature of style with the object of developing style-describing tools that can help designers to differentiate styles consistently and accurately. 1.1 Definitions of style The word 'style' is used widely (and freely) to describe dissimilar charac- teristics of a broad range of subjects. Not surprisingly, the latitude covered by its definitions is quite extensive. The space given to dictionary and thesaurus explanations of style is vast. Following are some extracts for evi- dence2: 'De Quincey's style is verbose and Hemingway's is terse; The wealthy couple really lives in style; He handled the awkward situation with style; Argyle socks are back in style. Last year's style was too trendy for me; Which style of writing paper do you prefer?; She styled my hair in a pageboy; He styles himself a revolutionary. '2 In academia, definitions of style also take many forms among different fields. Especially in the field of literature, the definitions are abundant and divergent. Enkvist thoroughly examines six different approaches to the definition of style: '... style as a shell surrounding a pre-existing core of thought or expression; as the choice between alternative expressions; as a set of individual characteristics; as deviations from a norm; as a set of collective characteristics; and as those relations among linguistic entities that are s。