Exploring Multiple Pathways of Product Design Elements Using the fsQCA Method

To address current product styling design issues, such as ignoring the joint effects of multiple styling elements when constructing perceptual imagery fitting models and thus failing to effectively identify the relationships between styling elements, a product styling design method based on fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) is proposed. This method first uses semantic differential and statistical methods to obtain users’ evaluative vocabulary for the product’s perceptual imagery. Then, morphological analysis and cluster analysis are employed to establish typical product samples and extract styling elements to create a styling feature library. Perceptual imagery ratings of these styling features are obtained through expert evaluation. fsQCA is then used to analyze the different grouping relationships between styling elements and their influence on product styling imagery, aiming to match user intentions through different element combination paths. The results show that this method achieves a consistency value of 0.9 for the most optimal styling configurations, demonstrating that fsQCA can effectively identify the multiple paths of product styling elements that meet users’ needs. The contributions of this study to the related fields are: (1) providing a new perspective on the relationship between user perceptual imagery and predicted product styling elements, and (2) advancing the theoretical basis for studying multiple paths of product styling elements. The research results demonstrate that using the fsQCA-based product styling design method can accurately portray the multiple paths of product styling elements that meet users’ needs, thereby effectively improving design efficiency. Finally, a teapot styling design study is used as an example to further verify the method’s feasibility.