DESIGNERS AND USERS: TWO PERSPECTIVES ON EMOTION AND DESIGN1

The 19th Conference on Engineering Design

This paper reports semi-qualitative research on emotions from the perspective of users and designers. Twenty-five positive emotions were ranked regarding four relevant issues for product design: frequency of experience, preference for experience, preference for elicitation, and difficulty in elicitation. Based on the results from this research the emotions that users frequently experience and prefer are: satisfaction, inspiration, confidence, joy, amusement, and relaxed. These emotions ranked high also among those that designers prefer to elicit. Emotions that are infrequently experienced and not preferred by both users and designers are: lust and worship. In relation to the difficulty of eliciting positive emotions through durable products, the conclusion is that it is a challenging task and little knowledge exists to support designers. The knowledge developed through this project is expected to be useful for designers and researchers to understand the role of positive emotions in product design.

Products can evoke pleasurable emotions in several ways: they can be direct sources of pleasure (e.g., being inspired by a novel car), and indirect sources by facilitating pleasurable activities (e.g., enjoying the thrill of reading a scary story, which is facilitated by an e-book reader). The role of (positive and negative) emotions in human-product interaction and the benefits of design that evokes positive emotions have been discussed extensively in the design research literature (see, e.g. [Crilly et al. 2004]). The discussion shows a general acceptance of the idea that designers, and design processes, can benefit from emotion knowledge (for an overview, see [Demir 2008]), and, related to this, various models, tools and methods have been proposed that are intended to facilitate emotion-focused design processes. Although the development was driven by the motivation to support designers, it seems that not all resulting knowledge and tools have been widely accepted and used in practice. Desmet [2009] observed that most design professionals acknowledged the relevance of emotions, but at the same time many were skeptical about theoretical approach, believing that emotional aspects of product design is the exclusive domain of their intuition, and too elusive to predict. Moreover, Van Boeijen and Daalhuizen [2013] have pointed out that even though suggested emotion-focused design processes are seemingly understandable, using them in practice is difficult, requiring extensive time investments and practice. We propose that even though the tools and approaches have been developed with designers' needs in mind, they have not always been derived from the actual needs and expectations of these designers. For these reasons, the current study attempted to outline the needs and expectations of design professionals with respect to emotion knowledge by giving them the opportunity to express their view on this subject. The main research question was: in the perspective of design professionals, what are the benefits of having a nuanced understanding of positive emotions in product development processes? The obtained insights can help ensuring practical relevance when developing future tools, methods, and guidelines to support designers in incorporating emotion knowledge in their design processes. This paper begins by introducing the topic of nuances of positive emotions and the aim of study. The second section provides a brief overview of stages in product development processes and involved roles, which served as a framework for the study. The third section reports the study, and the final section discusses implications and proposals for future research.

Design & Emotion Moves, 2008

Design & Emotion Moves is an edited collection of papers presented at the 5th international Design and Emotion Conference in Gothenburg, Sweden. In spite of the wide variety of angles and approaches, all authors share the basic proposition that in order to understand users (or consumers) and their behaviour, one must understand the affective responses that are involved in the processes of buying, using, and owning products. The book should appeal to anyone interested in understanding emotions involved in human-product relationships, and in techniques that can help utilising these insights in design practice.

Along with a growing interest in emotional design and pleasurable products, it is necessary to understand how designers are able to maintain emotional impacts of their design solutions throughout the design process, and how these solutions can find a way to evoke the intended emotional feeling of the users. The present study first examined emotional responses to early design sketches, and how these responses could be used to check if the emotional impacts of their early sketches were observed in a combinative way of cognitive-linguistic and physiological approaches. Based on the findings of the empirical study, we further discussed how the emotional differences of product images would be generated by product forms. We figured out that good form factors of early design sketches might elicit positive feelings and high arousal states, thereby incorporating semantically meaningful features in the product images.

2010

In my book Emotional Design, I proposed a framework for analyzing products in a holistic way to include their attractiveness, their behavior, and the image they present to the user--and of the owner. In this work on design, these different aspects of a product were identified with different levels of processing by people: visceral, behavioral, and reflective. These three levels translate into three different kinds of design. Visceral design refers primarily to that initial impact, to its appearance.

2019

Some products appear to generate strong emotional responses amongst particular user groups. The phrases 'love it' and 'hate it' can often heard. As design is becoming less about products and more about designing user experience, it becomes more important than ever that designers are sensitive and aware of user experiences. Developing empathy is proving to be a valuable element in supporting more effective design outcomes. This paper explores such emotional responses in a sample of first year industrial design undergraduates from the UK. Students were required to work in small groups and identify a product they agreed they 'loved' and one that they 'hated'. Each group then employed brainstorming techniques to explore why they responded that way in terms of the specific features or aspects of products. The pooled results were collected and evaluated. In addition a focus group discussion was conducted to explore these students' views on the relations...

Applied Ergonomics, 2007

International Journal of Advances in Psychology, 2014

Product aesthetics give people a sense of beauty and impression and encourages them to consume and collect. Companies employ shapes that are both emotionally appealing and compatible with the brand's image of aesthetics in generating favorable consumer responses. Existing research on branding and product design has demonstrated the importance of emotions. Consumers can base their evaluations of a brand extension on their subjective-affective reactions toward products. Many products are designed to attract consumers, and considerable literature exists on product-design methods. However, few studies have offered specific guidance on how to design products with emotional appeal to link brands and to initiate consumer emotions. Using a recognized brand and products as an example, we argue that emotional product design strengthens brand emotion and is appealing to consumers. We explored brand and product emotion by conducting a consumer-emotion survey and determined that (a) emotional-brand products have emotional product design characteristics, particularly the beauty characteristic; (b) emotional product design characteristics influence the brand emotion (repurchase, willingness to recommend, attachment, positive emotion, and passion) of consumers; (c) emotional-brand products have simple shapes, pure colors, and natural textures that exude a sense of design, fashion, and a pleasing appearance of emotional product design. The findings of this study support the future development and growth of emotional product design.

2019

Most products contain inherent images as well as intended images. While the influence of intended shapes on product evaluation has been well studied, the influence of inherent images remains unexplored. Thus, this study investigated the influence of inherent images on products. There were 20 subjects in two consecutive experimental sessions: 1) evaluation item screening, and 2) affective evaluation. In the first session, the subjects made decisions within the limited time in regards to their preference on the stimuli. In the second session, the subjects evaluated the stimuli with SAM (Self Assessment Manikin), which selected by their preference. SAM (Self Assessment Manikin) is an efficient measurement of emotional responses: valence, arousal, and dominance. In the study, car front images were used as stimuli on the similar disposition towards human face expression. Results showed that: 1) products contain inherent images that trigger affective differences; 2) arousal was the most a...