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