The Evolution of Product Form: Finding and Analysing Styles in Design Patents

Styles are categories of designs that share a distinctive visual concept. This paper introduces a structured approach to identifying styles in a large set of product designs. Employing a stringent conceptualisation of ‘style’, we use a novel combination of clustering and experimental methods to group into styles all US design patents granted during the period 1977-2010. Validating the results indicates that our algorithmic approach categorises designs no differently than would humans. Furthermore, we use the resulting categorisation to examine the dynamics of styles, finding that some product categories exhibit more style dynamism than others and that styles overall are becoming more dynamic over time. Our approach to identifying styles opens up new avenues for investigating the role of aesthetics in innovation.