Value oriented design of vehicles along emotional personality structures and character traits of customers

Over the last decades, the requirements for designing vehicles increased. Due to accelerating number of technological inventions, constantly changing social and aesthetical trends, the increasing smartification of products and the increasingly atomizing target groups it is becoming ever more difficult for car designer, to transfer the requirements successfully into a vehicle design. This creates a need of rethinking the design process in terms of how to collect user data, define target groups, identify trends, and derive relevant information to generate target group specific product design characteristics. This paper explores a data-based approach of target group description to derive vehicle characteristics including demographic and cultural information, emotional personality structures as well as character traits of customers. The findings presented in this paper based on a survey with a sample number of about 1.000 respondents from 5 nations from 3 different continents.