Designers need to be more than "product" experts...

The more I read, research and understand "design and emotion", or to use a better phrase "experience design" the more i feel that the future of industrial design will be less about being experts in "products" and more about being experts in "humans".

This may seem like an obvious comment - I mean, industrial designers have always placed humans at the centre of what they do - and to a large extent that is true. However, little by little i have come to realise that the focus has always been heavily biased toward the object in question rather than the human in question.

More recently there have been researchers and practitioners that have begun to latch onto this idea and approach. In many cases this particular approach to design has been labelled "experience design" or "holistic design". Unfortunately these terms too have been pigeon-holed into the realm of flash-in-the-pan 'buzz' words... nevertheless in their true sense these terms hold a fair amount of truth to them to help describe where the real focus should be. This idea is described succinctly in the book Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World (Merhoz, Wilkens, Scheauer and Verba 2008). Here the authors describe the approach by outlining:

"...you need to ask yourself, what do people want to accomplish? How does this activity fit into their lives? How can I deliver on those desires? Asking these questions inevitably shifts your focus away from one-off, standalone products and allows you to start thinking of products simply as elements of a much larger system"

This statement hides within it some key ideas. Firstly they talk about "what do people want to accomplish? How does this activity fit into their daily lives?” This point draws our attention to people, activity and daily lives. These are at the centre of what I believe should be the fundamental shift in design thinking.

When they talk about “people” it’s about understanding what everyday humans want, need and desire in this world. It is less about "users" and more about "humans" as although they are indeed 'users' of objects, products and systems, they are above and beyond humans that have desires that need to be met.

“Activity” and “daily lives” orientate the discussion towards the issue of context and of interactions over time, rather than momentary actions. The issue of interactions over time is an interesting one because it acknowledges the fact that people use objects and systems over an extended period of time, and over this time their attachment will evolve and change and adapt in different ways. The issue of context is also a crucial part of the equation. Context is not a simple exemplar of the location in which one might interact with the object in question but rather a more complex and dynamic setting in which the human-artefact interaction is constantly situated in and being influenced by. Furthermore with the advent and subsequent proliferation of portable products, the contexts in which we use devices is ever-changing. Unlike previously where the context was somewhat fixed to one location (like watching the television at home) nowadays the activity of viewing TV, browsing the internet, peer-to-peer communication, b2b communications and financial transactions (to name a few) can be done virtually anywhere, anytime. This changes the game drastically.

It is my view that the future of design should be genuinely focusing on learning, educating, practicing and researching the human part of the equation; the better we learn about ourselves in the real world the more relevant design will become. It is important that we continue to be product experts, but it is imperative that we become human experts… 

Designing emotions in design??

One of the first questions that popped into my head when i began my research in this field was: "can a designed object induce a specific emotional reaction from the user?"

Initially, I thought the answer to this question was "yes" - I mean the label for the topic - design and emotion, emotional design, pleasurable design, affective design and so on seem to suggest that this can be done... it felt like the focus was on finding out how to design products that would make the user feel a specific emotion while interacting with it.

I began to think that it was purely a matter of time before researchers would figure out how to classify the different aspects of a product and what emotional reaction they would elicit in users and map these out according to their reactions. For instance a product that used a light, brittle plastic material (cheap and nasty in other words) might generally elicit a negative response in users and thus would be classified as a poor choice of material if the desire would be to elicit a happy emotion in the user.

Soon after though I realised the problems of this line of thought. I began to ask myself "what if the plastic material was coloured in silver? would that increase its positive emotional response?" and I thought "well perhaps yes...". Then I asked myself "what if this silver plastic object was extremely usable? would it elicit a slightly more positive emotion?" again my response was yes... the further I thought about it the more complex the situation became.

Then i got into more of a problem when I thought "what about the opposite? what if it was a so called 'perfect' object but the situation in which you used it was frustrating? wouldn't negative emotions be elicited regardless of how good the product was designed?" and of course the answer in this case was yes.

To complicate matters even more I realised quickly that even if this 'perfect' object was used by someone of a different age, different cultural background or even of different gender might change their reaction to the product. Even two people of the same culture and age might have completely different reactions to the same 'perfect' product...

Little by little (and through personal observations through my research) this idea has been eroded away in my mind and now believe that it is near impossible to design "positive" emotions into an object that is used in everyday situations. The sheer amount of different circumstances in which users experience an object makes it extremely difficult to determine with any certainty that the object will elicit a specific emotion - if any at all!

Instead I have come to the realisation that emotional design or affective design or whatever you want to call it is about designing objects that can mediate appropriate emotional experiences during use. It is less about eliciting specific emotions and more about understanding what people want from their experiences and interactions with objects in certain circumstances and designing the objects around these needs (as a side note - I have found through research that oftentimes people's evaluation of how good an experience was had little, if anything, to do with the object's physical properties - or at least that's how it is perceived by the user - but I will leave this line of thought for a later discussion...)

This is not to say that the object's properties like colour, shape, size, material, functionality, etc... are not important. They represent the physical interface that the user wil interact with and as such will have some influence on how the experience is perceveid. However these object properties should be determined only after knowing what the product is, how it should behave, what its interactivity should be like and how it should fit into the user's everyday life.

To understand these central aspects of the obejct the designer should be armed with knowlege about the people they are designing for. This knowledge can come in the form of physical attributes (ergonomics, anthropometrics, biomechanical data, etc), cognitive attributes (cognitive ergonomics, psychology, etc) and an understanding about emotions (psychology, sociology, etc).

So, for now, I conclude with the following statement:

In my view, it is near impossible to elicit a specific emotional reaction through the physical design of an object. The circumstances and situations in which we are faced with everyday are too complex and too varied to allow for this to happen. My answer to the question "can a designed object induce a specific emotional reaction from the user?" is a resounding "NO!".

In fact the question itself becomes purposeless from this view. The question right now, given the stage we are at in emotion design research should be: "what do people enjoy about the world? what makes people happy? what makes people sad? how do people judge their experiences in this world?". Once we have solid answers regarding these questions within the design domain can we then move onto understanding how we can design objects to mediate appropriate experiences in the everyday world.

- Rafael

Welcome!

Welcome!

Hi everyone and welcome to my blog on design and emotion. I am starting this blog to help record my often random thoughts and ideas regarding design and emotion and to share these with the greater public.

The idea is to perhaps begin to discuss ideas about this topic in an ad-hoc manner and to (maybe in the future?) arrive at some sort of organisation of these ideas over time.

So, for now I will say goodbye!

enjoy and I will post something interesting soon!

Rafael