Biophilic dimensions of products and their effects on user preferences

Abstract

"Biophilia is hypothesized as one of the defining concepts guiding human preferences of everyday life. Although 'biophilia' has been well integrated as a design approach in Architectural and Urban Design, it is yet to develop in industrial design. Employing a two-staged approach, we aimed to define the biophilic characteristics of a product multidimensionally and examine their effects on the users' preferences. The first stage consisted of empirical studies to describe the biophilic dimensions. This endeavor yielded a word set (N=78) that qualifies the biophilic dimensions (N=6). The words obtained consisted of biophilic design values and the hypothetical biophilic product dimensions that were proposed by researchers. Also, we obtained a set of product images (N=18) to be used throughout the study. The second stage was designed to explore the effects of biophilia on user preferences. An expert group (N=120) assessed the associations between the words and product sets. Also, a user group (N=1.206) rated how much they preferred these products. The data obtained from the experts and the users were analyzed to examine how the biophilic dimensions predicted the user preferences by regression analyses conducted on SPSS 27. The results revealed that the functional dimension has a significant effect on user preferences in both biophilic and non-biophilic/ biophobic cases while the psychological dimension has a significantly negative effect on user preferences just in non-biophilic/biophobic cases.