Isn’t It Cute: An Evolutionary Perspective of Baby-Schema Effects in Visual Product Designs

The emotional value of products is deemed highly important by design researchers and practitioners in distinguishing a product from technically equivalent competitors (e.g., Chitturi, 2009; Desmet, Overbeeke, & Tax, 2001). Creating anthropomorphic features is one strategy in product design practice to accomplish emotional designs. This is reflected, for example, by a car designer’s concern for the “face” of a car (Welsh, 2006). Other examples can be seen in the creation of cute, babyish-appearing product designs, such as those of the Volkswagen Beetle and the Mini Cooper (Marcus, 2002; Patton, 1998). Through using such appearances, product designers make use of a deeply embedded human trait already known to psychologists and anthropologists where, due to the evolutionary significance of human features, perceivers are highly sensitive to them and attracted to them (Coss, 2003; Guthrie, 1993). However, the marketers’ and designers’ assumptions on the visual features which attract consumers’ emotions may have been based rather intuitively on such evolutionary principles (e.g., Colarelli & Dettman, 2003). So far, it has not been studied systematically in design research whether consumers’ affective responses to anthropomorphic product designs can really be explained by innate psychological mechanisms. In the present research, we put an evolutionary approach to the test by studying one type of innate perceptual mechanism: the detection of the baby schema (Lorenz, 1943) and, more interestingly, the nature of the resulting affective responses. Our research pursued two main goals. First, we wanted to take a first step in exploring the explanatory power of the evolutionary psychology framework in the area of product design by studying whether innate affective responses to physical features of the baby schema are generalized to product designs. Using such a framework bears important differences from the approaches previously used in product design research to study affective responses to design. Differing from explorative approaches (e.g., Blijlevens, Creusen, & Schoormans, 2009; Chang & Wu, 2007), using this framework allows for the creation of theory-driven predictions about the relationship between specific design features and consumer responses. Further, evolutionarily determined affect might be directly triggered by a product’s physical design features when a consumer sees a product; hence, responses to product design ORIGINAL ARTICLE