The Love and Hate of Bling Products: An industrial design student case

There are many different factors that influence our perception of products i.e. personal, product related and external factors. For designers to be able to address them all when creating new products, we need to deepen our understanding of the totality of perceptual experiences from non-instrumental interaction with products. One way of achieving this is by stimulating the creative process by utilising provocation. We have explored how industrial design students interacted with a product category with special product characteristics, namely Bling products. These products generate a lot of attention and emotional reactions, people seem to either love or hate them. In order to understand this love-hate relationship to Bling products and by using provocation as a starting point, we analysed nine industrial design student projects on the theme of ‘future Bling’. Self-reflective reports on the students’ design projects were categorized with the help of the Perceptual Product Experience framework (PPE). Although the students’ were confronted with a product type they initially disliked, we found that they transformed their perception of Bling both regarding pleasure aspects (e.g. how and why the product stimulates our senses) and meaning aspects (e.g. what the product represents or which value we ascribe to it) of perceptual experiences. Furthermore, according to the students’ self-reflective reports, they felt they managed to use this transformation as a source of inspiration and driving force in their design process.