Design styles are essential for categorizing products and product ensembles in many design-intensive domains, such as interior and fashion design. Consumers use design styles as a heuristic in product searches and purchasing decisions. However, the literature lacks consistent and comprehensive design style characterizations, leading to a plethora of non-comparable research insights and, in turn, to inefficiencies in the development and marketing of products and product ensembles. These issues are addressed by standardizing the style profiles of eight highly influential interior design styles. First, each design style's most characteristic aesthetic attributes and symbolic associations are identified. Based on these characteristics, human coders were trained to manually classify 1647 design ensembles. Leveraging the resulting novel ground truth data, state-of-the-art computer vision image classification algorithms are used, and artificial neural networks (ANN) are trained to identify prominent design styles in any interior ensemble. Both the sources and the models are released via Marquetry, an online interior ensemble image classification application, enabling future researchers to use the standardized style characterization, enhancing the comparability of future research results, and empowering practitioners and managers with the opportunity to make more informed strategic decisions in their pictorial communication with consumers.
A mathematical microeconomist