Design for emotion: ready for the next decade? - 28 September 2007

Read this article in Chinese (translated by Kyle Chen, proofread by Christina Li)

This is article is a special contribution from Design & emotion society

Emoti-sensorial design

In our local supermarket we recently encountered a so-called FreshSurfer. Any idea what a ‘FreshSurfer’ is? Well, a FreshSurfer is a liquid toilet block that Miriam Mirri designed for Henkel. You may remember the conventional toilet block which was – indeed – a block that slowly dissolves in your toilet. The FreshSurfer looks nothing like it. As the name suggests, it is shaped like a windsurfer. Both the surfer and his sail are shiny transparent plastic containers; one containing bright blue, and the other bright pink detergents. These detergents are not only very colourful, they also have a strong fragrance: in this case a grapefruit odour (other fragrances available are Lemon and Tropicana).

The FreshSurfer 

Does a grapefruit fragranced windsurfer belong in our toilet? We guess not. But the product is colourful, shiny, and, we have to admit, fun. This windsurfer shape for a toilet block can hardly be explained in terms of functionality, and therefore one will be tempted to explain this design in terms of an emotional benefit. Nowadays that would be a well-accepted explanation. Over the past ten years we have witnessed a growing interest in research and design work with an eye for these emotional benefits. More and more design research groups around the globe concentrate on emotion research as we have experienced in five consecutive Design & Emotion conferences, companies have started to establish emotion or experience laboratories, and there are few industries nowadays who do not claim to foster the experience of its customers. Design for emotion - or better, design for experience - is hot and rightfully so. Many have acknowledged that triggering a ‘right’ experience can have a tremendous impact on sales and public approval.

“there is always a child inside each one of us”

In this same period, companies have often consulted us to support them in their design for emotion practice. In many of these cases, they wanted to emotionally upgrade their product portfolio by making their products more pleasurable, delightful, exiting, or multisensory. The experience was considered an ‘add-on’, a cosmetic operation, that could easily be build on an already designed product. The FreshSurfer may be mostly innocent in its emotional qualities, but is this type of multisensory cuteness applicable to – or desirable for – all product domains? Although it may not be a very difficult way of appealing to emotion, it is also quite superficial. This kind of add-on emotional design often resulted in major incongruities between a products’ function and use, and the ‘experiential flavour’ that was created by different colours, surprising effects, or the addition of nice smells and sounds. The add-on experience was just taken from the air or copied from successful products on the market. The emotional response depicted in the car advertisement above (as was photographed in Hong Kong) may be cheesy, but it does visualise the tendency to simplify product experience to a basic experience of desire, pleasure, or fun. In reality, the experience of human product interaction is layered, rich, dynamic, and complex.

Starbuckisation 

Recently, Macau, an island of the Pearl River Delta, has become one of the main gamble capitals of the world. One who visits the most recently built casino, the ‘Grand Lisboa’ will be in awe for the grotesqueness of the architecture. This huge blob-shaped building is one huge vibrant and dynamic colour LCD screen. Inside the building there is a carefully crafted non-stop experience of youth, nightlife, freedom, and pleasure – it is a prototypical example of a designed experience.

Grand Lisboa in Macau

In their quest for experience, other companies adopted the notions from the ‘experience economy’ book. As Pine and Gilmore argued at the end of the nineties, people are less concerned with the product ‘as such’, but are looking for major life experiences in which the product plays (a minor) part. This Starbuckisation resulted in experience centers, with grand tours and restaurants, in which customers are entertained in many ways, meanwhile getting a glimpse of the new car or financial service. Following the laws of classical conditioning, they must have thought, people will attach the qualities of the experience to the product and brand and thereby develop a positive attitude to both. It may have worked and still works, but again, the connection between the product and the experience generated is often missing or totally artificial.

Experience profile

Now, after ten years of desperate, superficial, intuitive, clever, and over-the-top attempts, we feel the time is right to make a next step, a step to make design for experience a mature and powerful design strategy that can fundamentally change design practice and the designs that come out of it. So, how do we think such a mature strategy will look like? First of all, the desired experience should be defined before the product is designed. It should be congruent with and based upon the nature and function of the product, the company’s brand identity, and all kind of societal, cultural and social developments that seem worth to take into account. Defining an experience (profile) is not arbitrary and takes (a lot of) time; it is a design task in itself. The experience profile explains how the product will be seen and used, what meaning it conveys and what emotions and feelings it is supposed to elicit.

In a recent paper, we discussed three components or levels of product experience: aesthetic pleasure, attribution of meaning, and emotional response (Desmet & Hekkert, 2007). We thus define product experience as “the entire set of affects that is elicited by the interaction between a user and a product, including the degree to which all our senses are gratified (aesthetic experience), the meanings we attach to the product (experience of meaning) and the feelings and emotions that are elicited (emotional experience)”. These three components or levels of experience can be distinguished in having their own, albeit highly related, lawful underlying processes.

Framework of product experience (adapted from Desmet & Hekkert, 2007).

In the paper we used a Chinese teacup souvenir as an example to illustrate the three levels of experience. The enjoyment experienced from hearing the sound produced by the fragile porcelain lid when it is placed on the mug is an example of an aesthetic experience. The attachment to the cup being a memento that represents a visit to China is an example of an experience of meaning. The satisfaction experienced when finding that the size of the cup perfectly matches ones tea drinking needs is an example of an emotional experience.

The experience profile of a product can be described in terms of these experiential components. Once such an experience profile has been properly defined, it must be translated in all product properties the designer can affect. It has an effect on the sensorial aspects of the product, but also on the way it functions, it affects the way people operate the product and even the way the product is marketed. In sum, the profile has an impact on all aspects that together shape the human-product interaction. Fortunately, much research has been done over the past years on the relationship between product attributes and people’s interaction with and experience of products. The last Design & Emotion conference, which was hosted by Chalmers University in Gothenburg Sweden in September 2006, welcomed over 200 delegates of more than 20 nationalities. The program included four key-note speakers and almost a hundred paper presentations that addressed a wide variety of topics, discussing the practical, theoretical, societal, and methodological issues relevant for the domain of design and emotion. And we are now organising the next edition that will be hosted by Polytechnic University in Hong Kong in October 2008. These conferences directly contribute to the main goal of the Design & Emotion society: to facilitate dialogue between designers, researchers and industry. In our view this dialogue generates insights and knowledge that will bring design for experience into a promising next decade.

References
Desmet, P.M.A., & Hekkert, P. (2007). Framework of product experience. International Journal of Design, 1(1), 13-23.

Pictures
All Pictures in this article by Pieter Desmet

Paul Hekkert [PhD] is full professor of form theory at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering. There he chairs the section design aesthetics and supervises a research group carrying out innovative research on our sense perception and (emotional) experience of products. Much of this research is done in cooperation with industrial partners, such as Mitsubishi, Procter & Gamble, Philips, and TNS.

Paul has published on product experience and aesthetics in major international journals and is co-editor of 'Design and Emotion: The experience of everyday things' [2004]. He is co-founder and chairman of the Design and Emotion Society  and has co-organized four consecutive international Design & Emotion conferences.

Together with a colleague/designer, he also developed an interaction-centred design approach, called Vision in Product design (ViP) that is widely applied in both education and industry. They presently work on a book in which this approach is laid down. 

Paul is a board member of the European Academy of Design and serves as a member of the editorial boards of The Design Journal and Empirical Studies of the Arts. 

Pieter Desmet is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial Design. His background is in industrial design, and his research for his PhD degree focused on emotional product experience. His research has been published in several journals and presented at international platforms.

Pieter is interested in why and how consumer products evoke emotion, and in the development of tools and methods that facilitate emotion-driven design. He is an executive board member of the International Design for Emotion Society, and is a consultant to several international companies who develop products and services with an added emotional value.

Pieter is responsible for the Design Project 'Exploring Interation' of the IDE Master education 'Design for Interaction.' 

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