:DesignMarketingLab:

My observation suggests that some consumers, sometimes, do not make a good design decision. They buy fake paintings, choose unsophisticated wines, strange interior products, and ugly clothes. I might be one of them. I wonder if education or training could improve their tastes or their ability to identify better-designed products. Psychologists (Reber, Schwartz, and Winkielman 2004) suggest that when people are exposed to many objects, they are better able to distinguish good and bad products. Sometimes, I want to test if a critical skill is to appreciate the (positive-negative) value of an interaction between more than two components within an object. For instance, they must know whether a diamond shape goes well with a triangle shape in a painting, whether bitterness goes well with sweetness of a wine, and whether a red button goes well with brown boots.

Indeed, people evaluate a product highly when it has a positive interaction. For instance, when consumers buy a stereo, they consider whether it goes with other interior products that consumers previously purchased (Bell, Holbrook, and Solomon 1991; Holbrook and Anand 1992). Consumers also prefer a product when its form features are matched each other (Veryzer and Hutchinson 1998).

Then, how do we test whether consumers distinguish between a good interaction (harmony) and a bad interaction, and how do we train them to distinguish them?