Analysis of the Influence of Product Morphology in Innovation Fostering Using Product Phenetics: Dining Chairs as a Case Study

The achievement of innovation is deemed as essentially beneficial in product design.It helps differentiate products from competitors, increase user satisfaction, and drive market growth.However, knowing the key aspects that make a product be perceived as innovative remains challenging.This study uses the Product Phenetics approach and its Design & Change Space concepts to relate product morphology and innovation.The authors chose fifteen existing dining chairs in the market, gathered their prices, and downloaded 3D files of them from their brands' websites.First, a focus group selected the seven most conventional chairs of the sample.These chairs were aligned with a common reference point and superimposed in a 3D space to obtain the Conventional Design Space (CDS).The remaining chairs, the so-called original ones, were aligned and superimposed one by one on the CDS.The geometry added to the CDS by each of them was identified and the Euclidean distance between each added voxel to the CDS was computed.Considering price as a valid innovation indicator, its value was correlated with each model's cumulative Euclidean distance.The results of the Pearson correlation test between price and distance showed a high and significant correlation (p<0.01) between those variables.Although further studies are necessary, it can be concluded that fundamental changes in product morphology can be an innovation driver for product design.At the same time, Product Phenetics can represent a fundamental element for a promising new approach to be used in innovation-oriented conceptual design tasks.