Propheta: a New Morphometric Analysis Software for Industrial Product Design

This paper introduces ProPheTA (Product Phenetics-based Typology Assessment) as a new morphometric analysis software for industrial, phenetics-based product design (PP). Phenetics is used in Biology to determine similarities between species by comparing their formal external attributes. This way, PP replicates this procedure and, by doing a morphological analysis of different models from the same product family, makes it possible to relate their morphology with the user's emotional, perceptive, hedonic and buying intention response. All this requires working with CAD models, aligning, scaling, selecting them along the X, Y and Z axes, editing images, obtaining dissimilarity indexes, and correlating them with the user's response. Various CAD and morphometric computation tools not explicitly developed for these procedures are used to fulfil these tasks. File compatibility problems and excessive manual work and working time must be circumvented. ProPheTA has been developed in Matlab to solve these problems using a single platform. Ist performance in a previous PP study, which related shape to buying intention, has been evaluated to demonstrate ist reliability and speed. Results show a ten-time speed improvement in the computation with identical dissimilarity results. In addition, ProPheTA offers several advantages, such as ease of use, robust batch-processing capabilities, multiple output formats and improved compatibility. These functionalities, together with ist ability to analyze the outline of 3D shapes without manual selection of landmark points, make it a versatile software application which is flexible, reliable and much faster. Thus, ProPheta is arguably valuable for helping speed up the application of PP in industrial design. Keywords: phenetics, product design, morphology, computer-based assessment