On the Relationship between Emotion, Experience and the Design of New Products

Abstract

As people become more sensitive to dimensions of products that go beyond traditional aspects of usability, the need to understand emotion and experience and their implications for product design increases. This paper presents an approach to emotion and experience that is useful for designers. We present three prominent approaches to emotion and experience expressed by Dewey, a philosopher, Carlson, a cognitive scientist, and Csikszentmihalyi, a social scientist. We synthesize commonalities and differences in this work into a generative framework that is meant to help designers discover product opportunities to stimulate, enhance, or change emotional experience.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jodi Forlizzi

BIOGRAPHY

Jodi Forlizzi is an assistant professor of Interaction Design and Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University. She is an interaction designer contributing to design research focused on the intersection between assistive, aesthetic and social products. Her current research relates to inclusive design and the design of new categories of products and services, such as service robots. She is also researching and designing interfaces (small, mobile and ubiquitous) that support the limits of human attention.

Carl Disalvo

Carl DiSalvo is a PhD candidate in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. His areas of interest include the role of products and environments in facilitating social interaction and the use of life-like behaviour and expression in products.

Bruce Hanington

Bruce Hanington is an Assistant Professor of Industrial Design in The School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University where he teaches human factors, research methods for human-centred design, and design studios. His research encompasses personal, social and cultural factors in human-centred design, and the connections between ritual and artefact. He has presented and published his work in conference forums and as an invited speaker in the United States, Canada, Italy, Singapore, South Korea and England. He holds a BA in Psychology and a Master of Environmental Design in Industrial Design, both from the University of Calgary, Canada.