IT-Based Tools to Support New Product Design: A Case Study of a Design Consultancy Firm - Information Technology and Product Development - page 72

4.4.3 The Importance of the Visual

The growth of online visual repositories makes it possible to search a vast amount
of images very quickly. The images may be used to create mood boards or simply
provide sources of inspiration. For example, designers tend to use mood boards to
immerse themselves into a particular state of emotions associated with a task or
product (Liapis, 2008). These mood boards consist of a collection of visual images
(e.g., photographs, material samples) gathered together to represent an emotional
response to a design brief (Dartnall, 1994; Gardner, 1985; Gero, 1993; Gross, 1996).
At Studio Levien, images are often used to convey a quality or suggest an asso-
ciation on behalf of the viewer that helps to emphasize the qualities of the designed
object. For example, the image of a falling feather next to a new design may be used
to convey a feeling of lightness.
Images are a powerful resource to convey meanings, particularly emotional val-
ues and experiences (Wycoff, 1991). Their application can serve as an important tool
to communicate values that cannot be expressed easily through words (Sharples,
1994). The image can offer the designer and client a shared language, thus aiding
the communication process.
Based on a cognitive process model there are two approaches to help product
designers use visual images for their creative tasks, either by identifying and deliv-
ering images that might be useful for the designers, and/or by identifying properties
that can be mapped from partially identified design requirements to those of visual
images.
Both approaches are related to the issue of information delivery in supporting
creative design. In response to this, two tools were developed and integrated into the
virtual design environment: (a) An image search tool that searches all the popular
online image databases based on key words and properties introduced by the user
and (b) an image collection tool that allows the designer to create collections of the
images gathered from the image databases (Liapis, 2008).

4.4.4 Image Search Tool

The image search service provided in the prototype is a What You See Is What
You Get (WYSIWYG) tool. The tool illustrated in Fig. 4.5 provides access to every

Fig. 4.5 Interface of the image search tool