Emotion finds a way to users from designers: Assessing product images to convey designer’s emotion (original) (raw)

Understanding Emotions and their Role in the Design of Products: An Integrative Review

Background Today consumers expect more from a product than mere fulfillment of the intended function for which the product is designed. Modern-day consumers demand products that match and satisfy their preferences. Contemporary trends in design show consumer inclination towards objects which motivate them, improve their quality of life and spark emotions. Consequently, along with the functionality requirements, a product needs to serve consumers' emotional needs, and for that, the product must relate with them at their emotional level. The product's visual appearance is responsible for engendering first impressions and initiating a connection at the emotional level before product purchase. Previous research suggests that the emotional element of design could be more crucial in deciding the success of the product than the functional aspect as it affects consumer's decision-making in choosing a product. Therefore, design directed by emotional content is gaining more and more importance in current design practices, research, and education. Thus, designers must possess the necessary knowledge and skills to deal with this design paradigm of product emotions, analyzing the relationship between emotion, consumer behavior, and product design. This paper investigates associations between fundamental product design elements, product judgment attributes, consumer emotional response, and consumer behavior in the context of before product purchase scenario through an integrative review of literature in the domain of product design and emotions. Methods The study is an integrative review of papers from major journals in design, consumer research, management, philosophy, cognitive science, psychology, and marketing on the topic of Emotional Design from January 2000 to August 2020. 133 relevant articles were shortlisted and analyzed considering the purpose, methods, and main findings of the studies. Results The four major categories that emerged through the analysis of the shortlisted articles were 1. The Terminology used in Emotion Research, 2. Consumer Emotions and their relation with the other factors such as fundamental product design elements, product judgment criteria, consumer behavior, and environmental factors in the 'before product purchase' scenario, 3. Theories of Product Emotion, and 4. Assessment of Emotion. Conclusions A multi-faceted evaluation of articles of the first two categories resulted in proposing a new theoretical framework investigating consumer emotional response before product purchase context. The framework has been described illustrating key terms and associations between them with future directions on Emotional Design. It is expected that design practitioners, cognitive scientists, and ergonomists would find the developed framework helpful while designing products that elicit desired emotional responses.

A Perspective to Understand Emotional Design - Extending of Design Methods with Inherent Knowledge

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...

DESIGNERS AND USERS: TWO PERSPECTIVES ON EMOTION AND DESIGN1

We take as our starting point the distinction between two perspectives on products: designer and user. There is often a mismatch between these two perspectives, but both matches and mismatches constitute a major source of the affective reactions that people have to products and their interactions with them. These reactions extend over a wide range and include not only (relatively short-term) emotions, but also longer term reactions such as moods, preferences, and attitudes. 2

Nuances of emotions in product development: Seven key opportunities identified by design professionals

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.

Emotional Product Design and Perceived Brand Emotion

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.

Emotional design: People and things

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.

DIFFERENTIATING POSITIVE EMOTIONS ELICITED BY PRODUCTS; AN EXPLORATION OF PERCEIVED DIFFERENCES BETWEEN 25 POSITIVE EMOTIONS BY USERS AND DESIGNERS

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.

Design and Emotion: Time for a New Direction?

2009

This paper describes research investigating why the extensive effort in Design and Emotion research and publications has not had more significant effect in improving design theory and practice in spite of the large amounts of funding expended, the number of research projects and research centers and the large number of publications. The analyses point to two foundational research issues that appear to have been overlooked and which point to why Design and Emotion research culture is failing to make radical and significant impacts on design theory, design research, design practice and design education across all the major fields of design in the art and design, technical design and other design sectors. The paper concludes with a brief outline of the changes likely to make the Design and Emotion field more effective in improving design outcomes, design practice, design research and design theory.

The characteristics of form in relation to product emotion

Jamaludin, M.S., Zulkapli, M.F., & Abidin, S.Z. (2013). The characteristics of form in relation to product emotion. Proceedings of E&PDE 13, 15th International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education – Design Education – Growing Our Future, Dublin, DS76, 716-721., 2013

This study is to investigate the use of visual analogy in design characteristics. The main purpose is to provide an understanding of how product design can affect or influence user emotion. Emotion influences how users interact with the product; in the interaction, the feeling accompanies thinking. The success of a product in the marketplace will be determined by its aesthetic appeal, the pleasure it creates, and the satisfaction it brings to the user. In conjunction to a products emotion, the designer designs a product that can satisfy the user needs by using visual analogy and form metamorphosis, to create a product character that relates to user emotion. The study aims to communicate design form, emotion, user influence and application in the design process. This will focus on the element of semantic and syntactic analysis and interpretation of product emotion in design. Product emotion study is based upon the forms origin, which is also the influence of user emotion and product characteristics. It is important to understand the relationship between basic form and the products character so that the designer can achieve the goals of design and target their user by the product emotion. The theory is then investigated with a study of emotional responses to product appearance of a previously designed product. At the end of the research, it is expected to improve the understanding of theory of form analogy towards product emotion and it has important implications on design education as a cognitive strategy in the design process.

Emotive Form Design

Emotions are recognised as vital for human wellbeing and happiness, so are objects. However, studies on the practical use of emotions in product design remain limited. This academic project promoted the pedagogical encounter between emotions/dyads and the morphology/shape of products, based on the Plutchik's Emotion Wheel. The purpose is to improve and develop future designers' awareness of the emotive character of forms. In a visual thinking exercise, first-year students chose eight basic emotions to develop the forms of an 'emotional chair', drawing with pencil and paper to allow visual thinking and interpretation. The findings suggest that the Emotion Wheel is useful to reflect and manipulate forms to convey meaning, helping designers understand how to use emotive shapes for idea development and decision-making in the design process. This paper can contribute to teaching product design targeting emotional products, and offers guidance on how to evoke positive emotions through products.