The Schulich School of Business at York University announced the launch of a new state-of-the-art behaviour and product design testing facility that will house the renowned NOESIS Lab.
The NOESIS Innovation, Design, and Consumption Laboratory, which moved into its new space in January, features an impressive array of specially calibrated equipment to measure arousal levels and other physiological responses, such as changes in pupil size, that occur when people are introduced to new products and design innovations.
The lab, which is dedicated to fostering innovative research into consumption, consumer behaviour and design, will also help companies find out if their products will pass the ‘smell test’ with consumers.
Housed at Schulich since 2014, the NOESIS Lab is affiliated with 22 researchers and students across many disciplines at the Schulich School of Business; the Kellogg School of Business at Northwestern University (Schulich’s partner school for the Kellogg-Schulich Executive MBA); Queen’s University; and Western University.
The NOESIS Lab is currently in talks with several companies interested in testing new products at the secure facility, said Theodore J. Noseworthy, scientific director of the NOESIS Lab, Canada Research Chair in Entrepreneurial Innovation and the Public Good, and professor of marketing at Schulich.
“Marketers and new product design specialists can use our research results to better plan their launch strategies,” said Noseworthy. “This research can help them coordinate a launch that supports a climate where consumers are responsive to innovation.”
Noseworthy’s research and teaching focuses on how people make sense of innovative new products and how marketers can better facilitate consumer adoption of those products. His research also focuses on product categorization, category ambiguity and visual processing (on the part of the consumer). His work has also explored gender differences in the processing of visually incongruent products, how consumers trade off dominant product features for perceptual identity, how certain types of positioning tactics influence how consumers make sense of visually incongruent products, and how people make inferences based on the visual appearance of currency.
He is a widely-recognized published scholar in new product design and innovation. His work has appeared in the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology and Psychology & Marketing. His forthcoming paper, co-authored with Aparna Sundar at the University of Oregon, “Too Exciting to Fail, too Sincere to Succeed: The Effects of Brand Personality on Sensory Disconfirmation”, will be published by the Journal of Consumer Research later this year.