Humorous Product Styles and Pleasure: Positive-Negative and Overt-Subtle Dimensions of Humour

Abstract

Pleasure is a crucial emotional tie between a product and its consumers. A humorous product design is a strategically critical move to increase pleasure. In general, humour is considered to engender positive emotions, while neglecting that the emotional range of humour is broad and multidimensional. Therefore, this study investigated the application of humour in product design, particularly the humour products, which were classified based on positive-negative and overt-subtle dimensions of humour, and developed a scale to verify the relationship between humorous product styles and sensory pleasure. First, focus group interviews were conducted to categorize the styles of 154 humorous product images, in order to develop the questionnaire items. Second, a pretest questionnaire was administered. Finally, a formal repeated-measures questionnaire was administered to 324 participants resulting in 1926 batches of valid data. The results indicated that humorous product styles can be classified into amusement, hilarity, sarcasm, and offense, four styles; of these, amusement and hilarity were positively correlated with pleasure, whereas sarcasm and offense were not significantly correlated with pleasure. The implications for research and practice are considered here.

Keywords:

• humorous design
• humorous product style
• sensory pleasure
• affective arousal
• humour

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the editor and anonymous reviewers for their comments. The authors are also grateful to all participants in this study. This study is funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST 106-2221-E-029-009-MY2).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chia-Chen Lu

Chia-Chen Lu is an associate professor of Industrial Design at Tunghai University. Her research interests are emotional design, user experience design, and design creativity. She has published papers on topics ranging from design and creativity assessment, artificial appearance and design, design and emotion in reputed international journals.