Design and Product. Eco-compatibility Perception of the Materials and Product

According to the most advanced orientation of design culture, the choice of the materials suitable for a given project should be dealt with in the metaplanning phase, which is thus extended and charged with meaning: in this way, the materials have a recognised weight in the project, they support the technical functions and at the same time they create its personality. In the ongoing process of innovation in the field of materials and products, where the expressive-sensorial properties are increasingly underlined, the evaluation on how the man take into consideration this new dimensions, linked to the material and product perception, having acquired growing importance. On these assumptions the paper deals with a research carried out by MATto research group (Politecnico di Torino), where the innovative adoption of non-verbal methodologies and equipment, such as the eye-tracking machine have been experimented in order to take into account this new dimension linked to the human unconsciousness perception during the design process of an industrial product. Eye-tracking offers important elements regarding the capacity of the product/interface to attract/hold or to rebuff the attention of the observer: it is based on the registration of what a subject observes or ignores, when deciding to take into consideration a given product. Specifically these experimentations of using eye-tracking into the design process, have been arranged on several levels of analysis coincident with different objects of the study: material, semi-finished products, real and virtual prototypes and the finished product. The experimentation results collected so far are illustrated in this paper.