Excellence in design is about more than the final product itself. It is about creating positive, rich and meaningful user experiences. Consumers are ever mindful that the products we surround ourselves with and engage with during our daily tasks need to satisfy needs beyond the functional. While design is a key contributing factor at the point of purchase, the bond that emerges between the consumer and the product becomes the differentiator for long-term success, or failure, as is so often the case. As consumers of meaning, not matter, we construct our aggregate identities through engagements with the products we fill our lives with, objects that hold particular meaning (e.g. symbols of our achievements and indicators of our social lives), and this bespoke collection of frequently mass-manufactured objects (products) has a significant impact on the experiential fabric of our daily lives.
The relationship between design and emotion represents a contemporary dualism, the significance of which is only beginning to be understood, in terms of its role in shaping the social, economic and environmental implications of design, production and consumption. For the new product developer, it becomes critical that products are developed in such a way that their technology, appearance and use resonate and respond to consumer needs, aspirations and lifestyle choices. If products do not meet these needs, then barriers develop that become obstacles to the product's success – desire rapidly mutates into disappointment and replacement motives promptly manifest. Eliciting user needs is not as straightforward as measuring what is measurable. Users often say one thing, do another and often feel something else. We need to be mindful that design is culturally located in that the consumers’ values may not apply to another population, and therefore the research presented in this collection is transferrable though not necessarily generalisable, but equally could be valuable.
Much debate focuses on the degree to which design can influence, or author, the emotional experience mediated by products, due in large part to the deeply idiosyncratic, random nature of each individual user – their memories, experiences and values – regardless of their firm location within a prescribed demographic profile – people are people and things change. For designers, the emotional and ephemeral nature of consumers’ needs have been acknowledged for some time. With this special issue, it is our intention that we broaden the research in this area to include the engineering design community, mobilising an expansive, critical set of propositions. This special issue is dedicated to highlighting the increasing awareness and value of emotions within the designing process, for both the product developer and the consumer.
Based on thorough and strict peer reviews, a total of six papers were selected for publication from 16 submissions. These papers represent a snapshot of cutting edge research, disseminating recent developments in the field of design education, design research and new product development.
The first paper, by Sleeswijk and Kouprie, describes ‘A framework for empathy in design: Stepping into and out of the user's life’. This paper is an excellent exploration of the emerging area of ‘empathic design’; the theme that designers should attempt to develop their ability to empathise with the specific user groups for whom they are designing. These authors carefully define and unpack the terminology and issues surrounding the area and provide a scholarly underpinning which will be of value to academic researchers and practicing designers alike. Their term ‘stepping into and out of the user's life’ is a particularly useful description of a four-stage process they describe in which the designer may, first, be able to enter the user's world (this may be remotely using data) and ‘discover’ the user and his/her context; secondly, the designer starts to absorb the user's points of reference in an open-minded manner; thirdly, the designer uses a reflective phase to make connections on an emotional level; finally, the designer can detach with increased understanding and knowledge which can then be employed in ideation.
Nurkka, Kemppainen and Kujala provide a paper ‘Capturing users’ perceptions of valuable experience and meaning’, which reports a case study of the development of a tool to elicit user values and meaning based on a projective psychological technique in order to gain valuable user–product relationship data at the start of a design process. The paper offers a useful commentary on the nature of user experience with products. It moves on to look at the development of a method for identifying qualitative values using sentence completion techniques. The work will be of interest to academic design researchers and to practitioners who are seeking that ‘edge’ in the design of products. By identifying user values more clearly and reliably design teams can focus far better and increase their ability to design products that harmonise with specific user groups in a more effective manner. This, together with developments in customisation in production, means we can improve user satisfaction by producing better-focused variants around a core product.
Mugge, Schoormans and Schifferstein in their paper, ‘The emotional bonding with personalised products’ looks at ways of gaining a competitive advantage in the market by enabling purchasers to personalise their products. This paper is based on a case study of people personalising bicycles and the impact on emotional bonding with the product, but the principles extracted from this fieldwork can then be applied to other products. This is particularly valuable, as noted in the previous paragraph, in relation to increasing potential for customisation within the production process, for example, with training shoes.
Barnes and Lillford's paper, ‘Decision support for the design of affective products’, takes Kansei engineering as a start point and develops a decision support framework that can be used to elicit user emotional needs early in the development process. The aim is to support a design team on improving their optimisation of ‘emotional product communication’. The framework uses an eclectic mix of methodologies from additional fields such as linguistics, psychology and consumer research such as adjective selection, concept definition, user ‘experiments’ and quantitative evaluation. The paper describes the methods and how data generated can be analysed using a range of statistical techniques. A case study is provided to illustrate the principles and methods presented.
Girard and Johnson's paper, ‘Design and evaluation of a participatory-design approach for developing affective educational software’, looks at the development of a non-verbal self-report system to measure a child's emotional state while using educational software. The principles and techniques described would have currency in any design context involving children or, with modification, others who may have difficulty communicating their emotional responses to design proposals. The paper looks at some of the theories behind emotion and how we can develop our understanding of emotions in relation to product design. The paper builds on conventional ‘traffic light’ and ‘emoticon’ techniques and describes the iterative development of the instrument via a series of case studies in the UK and France.
The paper by Eggink, ‘A practical approach to teaching abstract product design issues’, will be of particular interest to those involved in the education of designers and engineers at university levels. The paper describes a specific element within a course for Industrial Design Engineering students at Twente University. The theme-based structure and teaching methods are described in sufficient detail to enable other educators to explore similar approaches in a range of design or engineering programmes in their own contexts; indeed, it is very useful ‘food for the mind’.
Design and emotion is an emerging field that offers numerous opportunities for scholarly inquiry and professional design practice. Despite the diligent efforts of many scholars, considerably more research needs to occur. It is our hope that the papers and themes presented in this special issue will spur more study to boost this important and flourishing area of research.
Finally, we would like to thank all the authors for their time and effort in contributing papers to this special issue and for incorporating the referees’ comments when revising their manuscripts. Each paper accepted was evaluated by at least three independent reviewers in two rounds, in addition to review by the guest editors. We are especially grateful to the referees who generously gave their time to evaluate all the submitted manuscripts. Last, but not least, we would like to express our sincere thanks to Professor Alex Duffy, Editor-in-Chief, for reserving pages and scheduling a special issue and for his advice, patience and support during the process of collating this special issue.
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