Emotional design

This section explores the idea that the look, feel, and pleasure-giving properties of a product are just as important as function in product design. It draws on the “emotional design” work of luminaries including Donald Norman and Pat Jordan, and explores the visceral, behavioural, aesthetic, and tactile qualities which make up a “pleasurable” product.

“More and more people buy objects for intellectual and spiritual nourishment. People do not buy my coffee makers, kettles, and lemon squeezers because they need to make coffee, to boil water, or to squeeze lemons, but for other reasons.”

Alberto Alessi, designer and manufacturer

Beyond usability

The functionalism promoted during the Modernist era of design is being supplemented by the more complex pleasures of emotional design, with designers now producing products that aim to strike a certain emotional chord. Consumers have come to expect that new products are intuitive and easy to use, and as such are no longer pleasantly surprised when a product is usable, but are unpleasantly surprised by any difficulties in use. Consumers no longer simply expect the products they buy to be functional and usable, but now actively seek products that elicit emotional feelings of connection, pleasure, and status. This can be achieved through the way a product looks, the feel of its materials, the tactile or “haptic” response of controls, or more abstract feelings, such as reflected status and brand values.

Designing emotions

Emotions play a crucial role in how people understand their environment, and how they engage with objects. Aesthetically pleasing products often appear to users questioned in focus groups to be more effective, by virtue of their sensual appeal. This is due to the affinity people feel for a product that appeals to them, and how they form an emotional bond with particular products, brands, and styles. Norman defines three types of design perception:

Visceral design

Visceral design refers primarily to that initial impact a product and its appearance has when you first catch a glimpse of it on the shelf, on the road, or on television. Successful examples of this approach include the Jaguar E-Type, Malcolm Sayer’s classic 1960s design, whose mathematically calculated streamlined and provocatively phallic form tapped into the psyche of a generation. More recent examples include Ross Lovegrove’s water bottle for Ty Nant (see p. 198), where the product successfully captures the aesthetic of flowing spring water, and persuades consumers to buy a freely available substance, and believe its taste, smell, and appearance is worthy of their desire.

Behavioural design

Behavioral design is about a product’s look and feel. It refers to the total experience of using a product; the physical feel and pleasure people can derive from it and the functional effectiveness and usability. Designers are now creating products that adopt traditional “simple” interfaces, such as the pull cord used to switch on Muji’s Wall-Mounted CD Player by Naoto Fukasawa, or producing critical products that question our social relationships with products, challenging or altering our behaviour, and representing the complexity of contemporary life.

Reflective design

Reflection is concerned with how a person feels about a product after use, and the social and cultural image it portrays to others. Norman proposes that Philippe Starck’s iconic Juicy Salif lemon squeezer for Alessi is a highly successful “item of seduction” that rejects the utility of function, and instead focuses on being a successful conversation piece and sculptural design. The lemon squeezer’s aesthetic is redolent of classic 1950s science fiction, and its stance resembles that of a spider’s. The technique of creating objects that resemble animals is known as zoomorphic design, and is a commonly used approach in emotional design.

How to create emotional products

While some designers intuitively bring visceral, behavioural, and reflective design together into a harmonious whole to produce successful emotional product design, there are a number of scenario modelling methods that can help designers to create more satisfying and pleasurable products and experiences:

• Product as person—The designer pretends that a product is a person. Byimagining this personality in a series of contexts, the designer can deduce how the product would talk, behave, and dress, and gain an unconventional insight into the emotional demands of the selected product.
• Design as magic—The designer describes how a product works by pretending it is magic. This enables the designer to ignore technical constraints and focus on what it could do unconstrained byconventional practice.

Ty Nant water bottle, designed by Ross Lovegrove for Ty Nant, 1999—2001. The visceral qualities of water are captured in this bottle design.

Wall-Mounted CD Player, designed by Naoto Fukasawa for Muji, 1999. Its simple pull cord on-off switch is an example of behavioural design.

Juicy Salif, designed by Philippe Starck for Alessi, 1990. An example of reflective design, where the sculptural quality is the prominent design feature.

Do Break Vase, by Frank Tjepkema in collab-oration with Peter van der Jagt for Droog Design, 2000. An example of extreme behavioural design. The ceramic vase is lined with rubber, and rather than smashing into pieces when thrown in anger, it physically records such events to create a lifetime relationship with the vase.

Pleasurable products

In parallel to creating emotional products, another possible framework for taking a structured approach to product design and marketing can be identified. Four types of human motivation or “pleasures” can help success in the marketplace and are dependent on connecting with users in one or more of these ways—physio-pleasure, psycho-pleasure, socio-pleasure, and ideo-pleasure.

Physio-pleasure

This is derived from the senses of touch, smell, and taste to create sensual delight, such as the smooth feel of an Apple iPod in the hand, the smell of a new car or freshly made espresso, and the taste of Belgian chocolate.

Psycho-pleasure

This includes issues relating to the cognitive demands of using a product and the emotional reactions engendered through the experience of using it. Pleasure also comes from the extent to which the product makes the task more pleasurable, such as the interface of an ATM cash machine that is quick and simple to use, or the enjoyable ritual of playing a vinyl record on a Wurlitzer jukebox rather than downloading and playing an MP3 file.

Toyota Prius, 1999 to present, was the first commercially successful hybrid electric car. It is an ideo-pleasure product that appeals to consumers’ philosophical and environmental tastes and values.

Socio-pleasure

This relates to the relationship and status people derive from a product, and the pleasure gained from interacting with other people through a product. This may be a “talking point” product like a special ornament or “artwork,’ or the product may be the focus of a social gathering such as a vending machine or coffee machine.

This pleasure can also come from a product that represents a social grouping, for example, a particular style of mooter scooter that gives you a social identity, such as the Mod subculture of Vespa riders. Products can facilitate social interaction in a number of ways, with email, the internet, and mobile phones enabling communication between people.

Ideo-pleasure

This describes the pleasure derived from entities such as books, art, and music, and is the most abstract pleasure. Products that are aesthetically pleasing can be a source of ideo-pleasure through appealing to the consumer’s tastes. Values could be philosophical or relate to a particular issue such as the environmental movement. For example, the Toyota Prius is a self-consciously “green” choice due to its hybrid drive, and embodies the growing green movement despite its questionable cradle to grave statistics.

Conclusion

Product design is a rapidly evolving discipline, and you need to be constantly aware of the ethical, environmental, social, cultural, political, and technological issues impacting on your work. Innovations in technology and software are blurring the boundaries of what is commonly understood as “product” design. Cell phones, such as the iPhone, are less defined by the physical hardware that you hold in your hands than by the virtual world of the interface and the social spaces of Facebook and YouTube. These developments were unimagined a mere decade ago, and illustrate the need to identify, research, and propose new design strategies that don’t merely respond to change but proactively help to redefine our world.

Designing products for this more complex world requires you to consider products holistically and adopt a deeper, more emotionally engaged, and ethical approach to future physical, virtual, and “meta” product design development. By educating yourself in the emerging issues facing design today, you will ensure that you are trained for the design industry of the future.