ABSTRACT
Styling is an integral part of any product design and development process. During the styling process, a designer imparts emotive qualities to products. Vehicles constitute a category of products that give a quantum jump to the social mobility and professional reach of individuals by facilitating the projection of their self to the outside world. The exploratory studies thereby lead to the generation of the following premise: The bread-and-butter biking, travel-and-comfort biking, social networking biking, dexterous and exploratory biking, and high-esteem biking segments can be differentiated on the basis of the associated emotive needs for biking and the emotive quality of biking. The subsequent findings were thereafter correlated and represented in the form of an emotion-centered model for motorbike styling in India. The developed model and design method together represent an emotion-centered research framework for product styling that can potentially be applied to diverse product categories that are categorized by cultural segments.
