Research Article Influence of Personality on Shape-Based Design Activities Stefano Filippi and Daniela Barattin DPIA Department, University of Udine, 33100, Udine, Italy Correspondence should be addressed to Stefano Filippi; flippi@uniud.it Received 31 May 2018; Revised 11 December 2018; Accepted 31 March 2019; Published 2 May 2019 Academic Editor: Francesco Bellotti Copyright © 2019 Stefano Filippi and Daniela Barattin. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. As the literature demonstrates, designers’ personality infuences design activities like diferent ways to represent environments and/or products, technological advances, etc.. Nevertheless, an exhaustive analysis on the infuence of personality on design activities involving diferent representations is missing. Tis research explores this gap by studying this infuence on specifc design activities, the shape-based ones (i.e., analysis of specifc shapes and highlighting of functions suggested by them). People showing diferent personalities undergo tests where they carry out design activities exploiting several representations. Te results confrm the infuence of personality on shape-based design activities and allow highlighting diferent keys to interpret and exploit these results. Tanks to the results of this study, researchers can increase their knowledge about subjective aspects of design as well as about how these aspects coexist with classic and emerging representations. As well, designers can try to maximize the efectiveness of their eforts by selecting the best combinations of personality, representations, and characteristics of the expected design results time by time. 1. Introduction Te literature already demonstrates the infuence of human personality on design. Sung and Choi [1] show that extraver- sion and openness to experience/culture positively infuence creativity because people with these traits are more fexi- ble and able to analyse ideas from diferent perspectives. Filippi and Barattin [2] confrm this and report also that conscientiousness and agreeableness positively infuence the number of design solutions and their pertinence against the specifc context because people showing these traits work proftably together to reach their goals. Steel et al. [3] claim that conscientiousness tends to increase innovation. Tis happens because innovation requires hard work, mainly to bring inventions to successful adoptions; conscientious people, strongly oriented to the goal, seem the most suitable in this case. Rothmann and Coetzer [4] highlight that people who tend towards neuroticism fnd less design solutions, with lower creativity, than people emotionally stable do. Tis happens because neurotic people are prone to having irrational ideas, are less able to control their impulses, and cope poorly with stress. Kohn and Smith [5] show that during a brainstorming process, agreeable people generate fewer ideas, with lower variety, because of the infuence of the other participants. Te literature shows also that diferent ways to represent environments, products, interactions between environments and products, users, and interactions between products and users [6] infuence design activities. According to Starkey et al. [7], virtual and real representations of products can afect creativity diferently. Considering product dissection as a help to generate results for a design problem, tests with real users prove that dissection of virtual products rather than real ones increases creativity by reducing the efects of fxation. To Maher et al. [8], real and tangible interfaces allowing direct interactions encourage users’ creativity and increase the number of design solutions, all of this in comparison to indirect interactions where pointing interfaces are used. Youmans [9] demonstrates that using physical prototypes instead of virtual ones improves novelty of design solutions. Kohler et al. [10] highlight that using simulated users (avatars) instead of real ones during interaction with virtual products in virtual environments can increase product innovation because all of this allows designers to work remotely and asynchronously. Filippi and Barattin [6] demonstrate the Hindawi Advances in Human-Computer Interaction Volume 2019, Article ID 9651369, 9 pages https://doi.org/10.1155/2019/9651369