Tahira N. Reid

PhD Topic: A Methodology for Quantifying Consumers' Perception of Environmental Friendliness (PEF) in the Exterior Design of Vehicles

MS Mechanical Engineering 2004 - Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute - Mechatronics Laboratory, Troy, NY


BS Mechanical Engineering 2000 - Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY
Contact
Information

tnreid at umich.edu , Personal Homepage

2250 G.G. Brown
2350 Hayward Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2125
Office: 3200 EECS
 Phone: 734.647.8402  Fax: 734.647.8403

Research
Interests
Interdisciplinary product design
Quantification of subjective attributes and including them in design optimization models
Decision making and understanding how consumers make judgments
Environmentally conscious design
Emotional design
Industrial design techniques
  Quantifying the subjective perception of product attributes has become an increasingly interesting problem that many in engineering, psychology, and marketing have attempted to solve. Previous research has assessed the aesthetics, emotional appeal, and expressiveness of "concept-based" attributes (i.e. luxury, sporty) in products. Environmental friendliness is a new product attribute that has emerged in prominence as consumers and manufacturers become more concerned with issues of sustainability and the "footprint" on the environment. An added challenge is that consumers often have a difficult time making decisions about "green" products for reasons that span from lack of trust in eco-labels to expectations that they will have to compromise on performance, price and quality. There is an opportunity then to understand the design factors that influence perceptions of products designed with the environment in mind.

Using the exterior design of vehicles as a case study, Tahira's research seeks to identify the visual cues that influence PEF, create a functional relationship between all relevant design variables, and examine the competing tradeoffs that exist among them in an optimization framework.