A series of recommendations for industrial design conceptualizing based on emotional design

Abstract

The importance of emotional design on product development has grown signifi- cantly over the past few decades. Industrial designers have gone from simple-minded functionality to a conception where their main purpose is to create products and experiences that can build emotional, deep, long, and long-lasting bonds with users (Roberts 2005). Consequently, several investigators and compa- nies started to research and develop different ways to introduce emotional design within the design processes. Methods like Kansei Engineering, Kano Method, and Semantic Differential have been developed to understand users’ emotional desires. Several categorizations of emotions along several dimensions were made. Some of them were based on arousal and valence (Hepach 2011), some others were based on the subconscious level on which they acted (Norman 2004). After the development of these methods, investigators and design professionals started to apply emotional design in their projects to create meaningful and more personal products (Norman 2004; Spillers 2004; Desmet and Fokkinga 2013). Some studies have brought up exciting and revealing news about emotions, as their deep correlation with decision making (Gray et al. 2002) or their capability to overrun cognitive barriers when it comes to product appreciation. Nowadays, industrial designers face several difficulties when they apply emo- tional design into their projects. For this reason, the objective of this chapter was to provide to the industry a series of recommendations for the application of emotional design during the design process. The present research was divided into two parts. First, a series of recommendations were created to facilitate the application of emotional design during the design process. Later, these recommendations were handed to a group of industrial design students who applied them on one of their projects. As the recommendations are solely for the conceptualization phase, the resulting pieces were not graded on the emotional response they may or may not have caused; they were rather analyzed in search of concepts related to emotional design.