Rick Schifferstein

Delft University of Technology | TU · Department of Industrial Design

Labeled Magnitude Scales (LMS) have gained substantial popularity in the sensory community. They were claimed to outperform traditional response methods, such as category rating and magnitude estimation, because they allegedly generated ratio-level data, enabled valid comparison of individual and group differences, and were not susceptible to ceili...

People describe their product experiences using adjectives that can be divided into three groups: sensory descriptors (e.g., hard, red, noisy); symbolic descriptors (e.g., interesting, expensive, modern); and affective descriptors (e.g., pleasant, beautiful). All product experiences rely on information from sensory modalities. We developed a questi...

Ever since smoking was prohibited in restaurants, bars, and clubs, undesirable smells that were previously masked by cigarette smoke became noticeable. This opens up opportunities to improve the dance club environment by introducing pleasant ambient scents that mask the unwanted odors and to allow competing clubs to differentiate themselves. A fiel...

Food packaging is essential for preserving food safety and quality while also addressing environmental concerns. Designers are at the forefront of developing packaging solutions that not only meet functional requirements but also align with evolving consumer preferences and sustainability concerns. To inform designers, this paper discusses fundamen...

The first designers specialized in food design in the Netherlands about 25 years ago. Since then, more and more designers have joined them and presented their work at exhibitions and events. In addition, specialized food design courses and curricula have been developed. However, interviews with professionals and scientists in the field of nutrition...

Addressing sustainability challenges requires shifts in consumption patterns and lifestyles. Design for Sustainable Behavior (DfSB) aims to cultivate sustainable attitudes and behaviors through product-based interventions. However, there can be a disconnect between design strategy and its embodiment and sometimes conflicts between designers’ intent...

To qualify as food design, technological details must be placed in perspective of the all-encompassing challenge of designing a successful, tasty food product that contributes to a desirable society. Articles describing food product development typically focus on technological issues, while they should provide a broader, multidisciplinary perspecti...

Designers hope that their innovations will be adopted by the people they are designed for. How well their designs align with consumers’ cultural contexts is a key determinant of whether they are accepted or rejected. This is especially important for food solutions, as eating habits are deeply rooted in local cultures. However, academic disciplines...

While over the last century food systems have become more controlled, standardized and globalized, the plants and animals that form the basis of our food production still show seasonal fluctuation. The growth and reproductive cycles of these organisms follow seasonal weather patterns, including changes in rainfall, light exposure and temperature. F...

This article introduces the concept of mood sensitivity: a service agent’s ability to detect mood during service encounters and customize their interaction style accordingly, with the purpose of improving service encounters as a whole. We report on an experience sampling study that explored the role that mood plays in service provision. Eleven serv...

Although governments have implemented regulations to inform consumers on important product properties and protect consumers from deceptive information, empirical research on how consumers perceive, interpret and experience food packages have shown frequently that consumers may be misled by how information is presented and packages are designed. Whi...

Commercial food packages may contain multiple messages. Packaging designers try to integrate all messages into a coherent design. Designers may use text, images or stylistic features, but these mediums may differ in their suitability to communicate specific product benefits. To evaluate the usefulness and effectiveness of these three mediums, we no...

Designers are increasingly tackling complex societal challenges and fostering system transitions. Transitions are long-term, multi-level, multi-phasal system changes involving numerous actors, requiring innovations that develop new relationships within the system. Therefore, the process of designing for transitions requires new ways of bridging sys...

An increasing number of people tend to eat alone due to social changes and an altered attitude towards cooking and eating practices. Anecdotal reports indicate that solo diners tend to use information and communication technology devices, for example, the smartphone, as part of the eating experience. While lab studies suggest that the devices contr...

Disgust is a strong emotion of aversion. In the context of food, it is often referred to as a guardian of the mouth, preventing close contact with pathogens and the accidental consumption of poisons. However, disgust can also create a certain level of attraction and be part of positive experiences, even in the context of food. In this article, we d...

Food experiences extend beyond the eating of food. They may involve fantasizing about food, perceiving the venue where you buy or consume it, seeing or smelling the food from a distance, touching its package or container, the tools you use to prepare and cook, the cutlery you use to eat, the way you dispose of the leftovers, and so on. In each of t...

This systematic overview tries to link scientific knowledge on human perception and appreciation mechanisms to culinary practices. We discuss the roles of the human senses during eating, starting out with basic mechanisms of taste and smell perception, up to principles of aesthetics. These insights are related to how foods are experienced, how ingr...

Food appearance sets intentions and expectations. When designing packaged food much attention is devoted to packaging elements like color and shape, but less to the characteristics of the images used. To our awareness, no study has yet investigated how the appearance of the food shown on the package affects consumers’ preferences. Often, orange jui...

Within the scope of Design for Sustainable Behaviour, the connection between behavioural change strategies and design idea generation has received limited attention. This paper highlights metaphorical thinking in product design to stimulate sustainable behaviour. In particular, the current study proposes a metaphor-based design method to guide desi...

Affluent societies face several challenges involving the relationships between people and their food, including the rise of welfare diseases and the huge amount of food wasted. These problems are partly due to the operation of the market economy, in which companies develop products that cater to momentary desires of individual consumers. To tackle...

What makes food design different from other types of industrial product design? Based on over twenty years of professional design practice and food experience research, the authors present a variety of insights – clustered in five overarching themes – that provide an invaluable view on the specifics of the food realm for practicing designers in thi...

The colour of the background on which products are presented may affect their perceived attractiveness. In order to find out on which type of background various fresh food products look most attractive, we presented five different vegetables (tomato, carrot, yellow bell pepper, eggplant, mushroom) on five different backgrounds with neutral grey col...

The variety of fruits and vegetables in today's supermarkets is enormous. We investigated how color may lead consumers to anticipate differences in product properties. Forty volunteers rated the expected properties for carrots with different colors presented in pictures, together with their familiarity, purchase intention, and intended preparation...

Designing for pleasurable and engaging product experiences requires an understanding of how users will experience the product, sometimes at a very abstract level. This focus on user experiences, rather than on the formal qualities of the product, might cause difficulties for designers in the materialization of design ideas. Designers need to naviga...

We present an introduction paper to the second version of the workshop on ‘Multisensory Approaches to Human-Food Interaction’ to be held at the 19th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, which will take place on November 13th, 2017, in Glasgow, Scotland. Here, we describe the workshop’s objectives, the key contributions of the dif...

A product has multiple sensory properties, each of which can be evaluated on its affective quality. In the current study, we investigated differences in the evaluation of the affective quality of auditory and visual product appearances and their potential contribution to the overall (auditory-visual) affective quality of domestic appliances. We use...

Designers can play a significant role in providing the world population with food that is produced in a sustainable way, is tasty and healthy and can form the centrepiece in culinary experiences. However, design students will need to acquire more knowledge specific for the food domain if they want to qualify as cooperation partners for other food p...

The perception of sensory information constitutes the starting point for how a product is experienced: from the cognitive associations and meanings it evokes, whether it is pleasing or not, through to the emotional responses it may activate, and any actions it triggers. Food products are unique in that our interactions with them may involve all of...

Even though designers are specifically trained to create and build new products, their contribution to innovation in the food industry is relatively small. The industry seems unfamiliar with the ways in which designers operate and may be unaware of the added value they may provide. Therefore, this article identifies the potential roles that designe...

The color of the background on which products are presented may affect their perceived attractiveness. We presented five different vegetables (tomato, carrot, yellow bell pepper, cucumber, eggplant) on four different background colors (orange or blue, either light or dark). Although the backgrounds did not affect the direct color perception of the...

Moving from conceptual design intentions to the materialization in product sensory qualities can be challenging. For Experience-driven designers this transition can be even more difficult, as they need to move from the abstract level of user experience to the concrete level of product features. In this paper, we suggest an approach to progressively...

Product designers may struggle to materialize their initial, abstract idea into tangible sensory features forming a product. Being aware of the role of every sensory modality in conveying a specific experience, they are more likely to come up with original and meaningful solutions. However, it can be challenging to manage an experience-driven, mult...

Smart Product-Service Systems (Smart PSSs) integrate smart products and e-services into single solutions. Smart products make use of information and communication technology (ICT) to collect, process and produce information, while e-services are web portals, apps and means alike, which facilitate the communication between service providers and cons...

In attempt to influence how a product is experienced, designers can manipulate all aspects of a product, including odor. The effect odor has on a consumer’s experience of the product is still not yet understood. Two experiments were conducted in order to shed more light on the influence odor has on consumers. In Experiment 1, differences in people’...

A product is a multi-sensory object and each sensory property can contribute to the product experience. In this study, we investigated the effect of sound (pleasant, unpleasant, original, and no sound) on the perceived pleasantness of products (i.e., visual pleasantness and overall pleasantness). Results indicate that ratings for visual and overall...

Materials play an important role in the sensory experience of products. The visual impression (color, gloss, pattern), tactual feeling (warmth, texture, weight), the sound (acoustical properties), smell and - when relevant - taste all depend on the material. Each material has a set of inherent material properties that affect a user's experience. Ev...

Designers’ visual way of knowing and working tends to be highly valued in design research. In architecture such an approach is increasingly criticized. Since people experience buildings with all their senses, architects’ visual focus is said to the run the risk of disregarding non-visual aspects. This study focuses on the visual and tactile assessm...

During the various stages of user–product interactions, different sensory modalities may be important and different emotional responses may be elicited. We investigated how a dehydrated food product was experienced at different stages of product usage: choosing a product on a supermarket shelf, opening a package, cooking and eating the food. At the...

The warmth of a material is generally related to the material’s thermal behavior. However, the multisensory experience of warmth is also affected by other material aspects, such as the color or surface roughness. In the current study, we use an experimental approach to investigate the single and combined effects of color and surface roughness on th...

Creating pleasurable products requires understanding of the influence of sensory product properties on affective user experience and symbolic meaning of products. This paper gives an overview of a series of studies, in which we investigated the impact of sensory product properties (color, material, sound, smell, and taste) on affective user experie...

Although sensory adaptation, the gradual loss of sensation during prolonged stimulation, has been demonstrated in laboratory taste experiments, a comparable loss of taste intensity is not experienced in real-life eating situations. This discrepancy may be due to differences in the proximal stimuli or to differences in the ways the taste receptors a...

When people encounter products with visual-tactual incongruities, they are likely to be surprised because the product feels different than expected. In this paper, we investigate (1) the relationship between surprise and the overall liking of the products, (2) the emotions associated with surprise, and (3) the long-term effects of surprise. We crea...

This chapter provides the application of emotion research in new product development (NPD) and how to incorporate emotion into various stage of in the NPD through several real-life examples. As research and design are strongly interwoven and mutually dependent on each other, there are essential differences that need to be understood before readers...

When information from two or more sensory modalities conflicts, this can evoke a surprise reaction as well as feelings of amusement, interest, confusion or disappointment. In concurrence to joke theory, we argue that people appreciate and enjoy appropriate incongruities that can be related back to the product, whereas they are confused by and have...

When information from two or more sensory modalities conflicts, this can evoke a surprise reaction as well as feelings of amusement, interest, confusion or disappointment. In concurrence to joke theory, we argue that people appre­ ciate and enjoy appropriate incongruities that can be related back to the p roduct, whereas they are confused by and ha...

Companies that aim to evoke specific experiences among their customers, should not only modify their design process, but also need to reorganize their innovation processes. Experience-driven innovation has implications on at least three levels in the organization: company, brand, and product/service level. The creative process at each level can be...

Noisiness is an important product experience that is not restricted to the auditory properties of products; bright colors and cluttered visual patterns can also be experienced as noisy. The aim of this study was to determine to what extent the overall product noisiness is attributed to the sounds that the products make and to what extent is it attr...

Designers who intentionally try to create specific experiences for people, are more likely to succeed if they are aware of the messages conveyed by the different sensory channels and of their contribution to the overall experience. This paper describes a Multi Sensory Design approach in eight steps: selecting the target expression, conceptual explo...

The meaning of adjectives is often ambiguous and may be susceptible to contextual changes. Nonetheless, response scales with adjectives are often employed in product evaluation research. Because context-dependent changes in descriptor meanings may threaten the validity of research outcomes, the present study tried to demonstrate empirically whether...

This study examines the influence of packaging design on taste impressions. Building forth on research addressing transfer effects of symbolic associations from one sense to another, in this study it was studied if, and to what extent, potency-related associations portrayed by shape curvature and color saturation of yoghurt packages transfer to sub...

Experiential aspects of materials are addressed rather intuitively by architects during the material selection process for buildings. This paper explores the possibilities of relating material experience in architecture to technical material parameters and uses the perceived warmth of indoor wall materials as a case study. Various building material...

Methods originally developed for the sensory evaluation of foods are increasingly being applied to other product categories, ranging from personal care products to car interiors and air conditioning units. Furthermore, because an increasing number of food products tend to be available in packages from which they can be consumed directly, the sensor...

Consumer products can evoke a wide range of emotional responses. Nevertheless, these responses deviate from the emotions studied in the majority of the emotion literature. Whereas the general emotion literature tends to focus mainly on negative emotions, the emotions elicited by products tend to be mainly positive. Negative emotions concur with act...

This study investigated the varieties of pleasantness in bodily experience in order to advance the aesthetics of interaction paradigm. Interviews were held with twelve people varying in age and occupation. They were asked to describe pleasant experiences for Sight, Audition, Smell, Taste, Touch, Action and Thought. A phenomenological reduction perf...

Purpose – Past research on consumers' post‐purchase behavior has focused on understanding satisfaction. However, the consumer‐product relationship is much broader. This paper aims to deal with another aspect of post‐purchase behavior: the emotional bond consumers experience with their durables during ownership. The paper contributes to the literatu...

Warmth is an important characteristic for clothes, home interior and some leisure related products. We used an experimental approach to determine the relative importance of material and colour for the product experience of warmth. We designed products (scarves and breakfast trays) using warm and cold stimuli (colours and materials) in four differen...

Although all senses are open to obtain information during user-product interactions, some sensory information can have a larger effect on the product experience than others. We investigated an experimental approach to quantify the relative importance of the sensory modalities in user-product interactions. For each modality, two stimuli were selecte...

Although all senses are open to obtain information during user-product interactions, some sensory information can have a larger effect on the product experience than other. In this paper, we present an overview of studies we performed to investigate the importance of the sensory modalities during user-product interactions. Some studies have used a...

Stimuli from all sensory modalities can be linked to places and thus might serve as navigation cues. We compared performance for 4 sensory modalities in a location memory task: Black-and-white drawings of free forms (vision), 1-s manipulated environmental sounds (audition), surface textures of natural and artificial materials (touch), and unfamilia...

This study investigates the effect of personalising a product's appearance on the emotional bond with a product. We present a conceptual model for the relationships between the effort invested during the process of product personalisation, the degree of self-expression, and the degree of emotional bonding. Data from a questionnaire study in which r...

According to theories of grounded cognition, conceptual representation and perception share processing mechanisms. We investigated whether this overlap is due to conscious perceptual imagery. Participants filled out questionnaires to assess the vividness of their imagery (Questionnaire on Mental Imagery) and the extent to which their imagery was ob...

Freshness is important for food products, beverages personal care products and cleaning products. In the present study we used an experimental approach to investigate sensory dominance in the product experience of freshness. We created products (soft drinks, dishwashing liquids, and scented candles) using fresh and non-fresh stimuli (colours and sm...

Product personalisation gives individual consumers the opportunity to act as co-designers and partly determine the appearance or functionality of the product they buy. Whether product personalisation can provide a competitive advantage depends on how it is implemented in new products and to which target group it is aimed. This article presents a cl...

Refreshing is a term often used to characterize certain types of foods and beverages. This review first explores what is known from sensory and consumer studies on refreshing perception in relation to food and beverage consumption. It then presents and discusses the similarities between sensory characteristics perceived as refreshing with those per...

In the area of product design, sensory dominance can be defined as the relative importance of different sensory modalities for product experience. It is often assumed that vision dominates the other senses. In the present study, we asked 243 participants to describe their experiences with consumer products in various situations: while buying a prod...

Fluid food products are always consumed from a container: a package, a cup, a bowl, and so on. The properties of this container may affect how the food is experienced. In the present study, we develop a method to study the effects of container properties on the experience of drinking beverages. Participants either evaluated empty cups made from dif...

The perception of a product through vision creates expectations of what will be perceived through touch. However, the tactual information perceived may disconfirm the expectations formed, resulting in a surprise reaction. In two experiments, participants' reactions to products with visual-tactual incongruities were studied. Participants were 100 st...

A child's first tactual experiences with objects mostly involve being touched. Once children grow old enough to reach out and touch what surrounds them, their tactual experiences become active. And although children are aware that they are the active agent in kicking the ball and riding the bicycle, it is not always clear whether they are cuddling...

This chapter is concerned with why people develop strong relationships to certain products and how designers may influence the degree of attachment through product design. An attachment is an emotion-laden target-specific bond between two persons. Product attachment is defined as the strength of the emotional bond a consumer experiences with a spec...

This chapter highlights the roles of the various senses and their interplay when people interact with different products. Besides highlighting the key theoretical debates in this area, the discussion centers on empirical data gathered in well-controlled experimental studies, as well as on survey data. It also highlights a number of examples where t...