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This paper aims to explore consumer perceptions of product design awards (PDAs) and their impact on consumer product evaluation and attitude formation about the award-winning product, the award-winning organization and the award-granting organization.

Based on the grounded theory approach, an exploratory qualitative study is conducted, using 16 semi-structured in-depth interviews with Turkish consumers through discussions on real-world examples.

Results show that consumers develop emotional responses to PDAs (e.g. interest, curiosity and confusion), hypothesize reasons for products receiving awards and cite rewards as confirmation of their existing judgments about products. PDAs are perceived as extrinsic cues signaling quality and price, and their impact is increased when consumers feel that the award is based on functional feature superiority. Consumer responses to PDAs are also influenced by the perceived expertise of the award-granting organization and beliefs about the award-granting process. Finally, PDAs can lead to positive brand-perception outcomes, influencing consumer perceptions of the product company as resourceful, competent and prominent.

This study shows that it is critical for companies to inform consumers about the specific features that resulted in a given product receiving a design award, as well as to provide information about the PDA itself.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first attempt to explore consumer perceptions of and reactions to PDAs, with significant implications for both the marketing managers of PDA-winning products and award-granting organizations.

Regarding industrial sports products, there is sometimes a dual sport and health meaning intended by designers. Appearances of sport products are often quite opposite to health products. Design choices made by designers can thus be misunderstood by users. This paper aims to deeper understand the perception gap between designers and users within earlier stages of the design process to limit this confusion and help designers.

The authors propose an approach to help designers defining the perception of a new dual and hybrid product field. The first step is to collect designers’ perception through interviews combined with card sorting. The second step is to compare the perception of designers with that of users. Comparisons are based on an agreement measure.

The approach provides a first step to evaluate the perception of a dual hybrid product field. It allows designers to extract trends and perceptions to be considered for the design of products, to consolidate and confirm their intuitions regarding the intended dual meaning.

The main contribution of this paper is to evaluate the perception of a new and non-defined hybrid product field presenting a duality in appearance. This approach can be used by designers either to identify trends to be considered, reinforce the intended meaning, or validate their intuitions while designing products with dual meanings before.

In product modular design tasks, especially in the high-tech manufacturing industry, buyers and supplies play distinct roles, which may have different impacts on product architectural and modular innovation. Prior research has tended to view product innovation as a holistic concept, overlooking the importance of this differentiated influence. This study, from a modular design perspective, aims to clarify the impact of black-box supplier involvement on product architectural and modular innovation, as well as the influence of product modularity on these relationships.

Based on the theory of product modular design, this study decomposes product innovation into architectural and modular innovation from the perspective of the product internal structure to conduct in-depth theoretical analysis and model construction. A total of 276 valid questionnaires are collected from typical Chinese high-tech manufacturing firms and used to empirically test the constructed theoretical model using multiple hierarchical regression analysis.

The results show that black-box supplier involvement positively affects modular innovation and takes an inverted U-shape, as moderated by product modularity. However, the impact of black-box supplier involvement on architectural innovation shows contradictory differences at different modularity levels. Under a low level of product modular design, black-box supplier involvement has a negative impact on architectural innovation, but under a moderate level of modular design, it has a positive impact. After the degree of modular design exceeds a certain threshold, the impact gradually weakens.

The results provide valuable insights for managers, highlighting the need to avoid oversimplifying the innovation impact of black-box suppliers solely based on overall product innovation. Instead, a more accurate assessment of the innovation contributions of both the buyer and supplier should be based on the degree of architectural and modular innovation. Additionally, the findings suggest that managers should consider the alignment between their company's product modular design features and innovation priorities (i.e. modular innovation or architectural innovation) when determining an appropriate supplier collaborative development strategy.

This study not only reveals the different impacts of black-box supplier involvement on architectural and modular innovation, but also proves the significant synergistic innovation effect of the relationship between black-box supplier involvement and product modularization. It constitutes an enriched and deepened exploration in the existing research on supplier involvement in product innovation.

This paper aims to present a case study of virtual-reality-based product demonstrations featuring items of furniture. The results will be of use in further design and development of virtual-reality-based product demonstration systems and could also support effective student learning.

A new method was introduced to guide the experiment by confirming orthogonal arrays. User interactions were then planned, and a furniture demonstration system was implemented. The experiment comprised two stages. In the evaluation stage, participants were invited to experience the virtual-reality (VR)-based furniture demonstration system and complete a user experience (UX) survey. Taguchi-style robust design methods were used to design orthogonal table experiments and planning and design operation methods were used to implement an experimental display system in order to obtain optimized combinations of control factors and levels. The second stage involved a confirmatory test for the optimized combinations. A pilot questionnaire was first applied to survey demonstration scenarios that are important to customers.

The author found in terms of furniture products, product interactive display through VR can achieve good user satisfaction through quality design planning. VR can better grasp the characteristics of products than paper catalogs and website catalogs. And VR can better grasp the characteristics of products than online videos. For “interactive inspection”, “function simulation”, “style customization” and “set-out customization” were the most valuable demonstration scenarios for customers. The results of the experiment confirmed that the “overall rating”, “hedonic appeal” and “practical quality” were the three most important optimized operating methods, constituting a benchmark of user satisfaction.

The author found that it is possible to design and build a VR-based furniture demonstration system with a good level of usability when a suitable quality design method is applied. The optimized user interaction indicators and implementation experience for the VR-based product demonstration presented in this study will be of use in further design and development of similar systems.

We consider a joint optimization problem of product platform design and scheduling on unrelated additive/subtractive hybrid machines, and seek to find efficient solution approaches to solve such problem.

We propose a mathematical formulation for the problem of simultaneous product platform design and scheduling on unrelated additive/subtractive hybrid machines, and develop a simulated annealing-based hyper-heuristic algorithm with adjustable operator sequence length to solve the problem.

The simulated annealing-based hyper-heuristic algorithm with adjustable operator sequence length (SAHH-osla) that we proposed can be quite efficient in solving the problem of simultaneous product platform design and scheduling on unrelated additive/subtractive hybrid machines.

To the best of our knowledge, we are one of the first to consider both cost-related and time-related criteria for the problem of simultaneous product platform design and scheduling on unrelated additive/subtractive hybrid machines.

Art-infusion has become a common practice among brands across the globe. This is because marketers leverage the uniqueness and prestige of arts to earn superior profits. Hence, this research aims to understand and measure consumers' willingness to pay (WTP) for art-infused products.

A questionnaire was designed based on conjoint analysis and was responded to by 470 respondents from India. The estimation of preference functions in conjoint analysis was intended to use orthogonal arrays to measure WTP.

The study reveals consumers' utility and WTP for different art-infused products. The results indicated that consumers have the highest WTP for products that have artwork dominated by the visual elements of colour, shapes and space.

The paper presents valuable findings for marketers to develop their product design and earn superior profits.

This is the first study in the domain of the art infusion phenomenon that measures WTP for non-luxury art-infused products. Also, this is the first study to measure WTP for different kinds of art forms.

With the development of science and technology, more creators are trying to use new crafts to represent the cultural trends of the social media era, which makes cultural heritage innovative and new genres emerge. This compels the academic community to examine craft from a new perspective. It is very helpful to understand the hidden representational structure of craft more deeply and improve the craft innovation system of cultural and creative products that we deconstruct the craft based on Complex Network and discover its intrinsic connections.

The research crawled and cleaned the craft information of the top 20% products on the Forbidden City’s cultural and creative products online and then performed Complex Network modeling, constructed three craft representation networks among function, material and technique, quantified and analyzed the inner connections and network structure of the craft elements, and then analyzed the cultural inheritance and innovation embedded in the craft representation networks.

The three dichotomous craft representation networks constructed by combining function, material and technique: (1) the network density is low and none of them has small-world characteristics, indicating that the innovative heritage of the craft elements in the Forbidden City’s cultural and creative products is at the stage of continuous exploration and development, and multiple coupling innovation is still insufficient; (2) all have scale-free characteristics and there is still a certain degree of community structure within each network, indicating that the coupling innovation of craft elements of the Forbidden City’s cultural and creative products is seriously uneven, with some specific “grammatical combinations” and an Island Effect in the network structure; (3) the craft elements with high network centrality emphasize the characteristics of decorative culture and design for the masses, as well as the pursuit of production efficiency and economic benefits, which represent the aesthetic purport of contemporary Chinese society and the ideological trend of production and life.

The Forbidden City’s cultural and creative products should continue to develop and enrich the multi-coupling innovation of craft elements, clarify and continue their own brand unique craft genes, and make full use of the network important nodes role.

This paper aims to fulfil a need to identify assembly interfaces from existing products based on their Assembly Process Planning (APP). It proposes a tool to identify assembly interfaces responsible for reused components integration. It is integrated into a design for mixed model final assembly line approach by focusing on the identification of assembly interfaces as a generic tool. It aims to answer the problem of interfaces’ identification from the APP.

A tool is developed to identify assembly interfaces responsible for reused component integration. It is based on the use of a rule-based algorithm that analyses an APP and then submits the results to prohibition lists to check their relevance. The tool is then tested using a case study. Finally, the resulting list is subjected to a visual validation step to validate whether the identified interface is a real interface.

The results of this study are a tool named ICARRE which identify assembly interfaces using three steps. The tool has been validated by a case study from the helicopter industry.

As some interfaces are not contained in the same assembly operations and therefore, may not have been identified by the rule-based algorithm. More research should be done by testing and improving the algorithm with other case studies.

The paper includes implications for new product development teams to address the difficulties of integrating reused components into different products.

This paper presents a tool for identifying interfaces when sources of knowledge do not allow the use of current methods.

Customers' co-design behavior is an important source of knowledge for product innovation. Firms can regulate the focus of information interaction with customers to set goals and motivate their co-design behavior. Drawing on regulatory fit theory and construal level theory, the authors build a research model to study whether the fit between the regulatory focus of firms' task invitations (promotion focus vs prevention focus) and their feedback focus (self-focused vs other-focused) can enhance co-design behavior by improving customers' experiences (perceived meaning, active discovery and perceived empowerment).

The authors conducted two online between-subjects experiments to validate the proposed research model.

The two online experiments reveal that customers' experiences are enhanced when the feedback focus is congruent with the regulatory focus of the firm's task invitations. Specifically, self-focused feedback has a stronger positive effect on customers' experiences in the prevention focus context. Other-focused feedback has a stronger positive effect on customers' experiences in the promotion focus context. Moreover, customers' experience significantly and positively affects co-design behavior (i.e. co-design effort and knowledge contribution).

This work provides theoretical and practical implications for firms to improve the effectiveness of information interaction with their customers and eventually ensure the sustainability of co-design.

This research explores the impact of classical aesthetics (e.g. order and symmetry) and expressive aesthetics (e.g. creativity and distinctiveness) on consumer green consumption.

This research conducted three studies. Study 1 explored the main effect of appearance aesthetics (appearance: plain vs classical vs expressive) on green products purchase intention through a one-factor between-subjects design. Study 2 verified the mediating role of perceived naturalness through two types of appearance aesthetics (appearance: classical vs expressive) between-subjects design. Study 3 verified the moderating role of product identity-symbolic attributes through a 2 (product identity-symbolic attributes: non-identity-symbolic vs identity-symbolic attributes) × 2 (appearance: classical aesthetics vs expressive aesthetics) between-subjects design.

Consumers will be more likely to purchase a green product that has classical aesthetics appearance (vs expressive aesthetics). Perceived naturalness mediates the effect of aesthetic appearance on consumer green consumption. Product identity symbol attributes moderate this effect. Specifically, for non-identity-symbolic green products, classical aesthetics can effectively enhance consumer purchase intention. For identity-symbolic green products, expressive aesthetics can effectively enhance consumer purchase intention.

Existing research suggests that aesthetic appearance can increase consumers’ evaluation of electronic products, beauty products and food, but the difference between aesthetics has not yet been explored. This research compares two aesthetics, contributing to the literature on aesthetic appearance in green products and offering valuable insights for managers’ green products marketing.