Editorial

Recent years have shown a steadily rising interest in the affective component in designing. One exponent of this, the Design & Emotion movement, became visible with the establishment of the International Design and Emotion Society in 1999, at the first international Design & Emotion conference (see Overbeeke and Hekkert 1999). Since then, a gradually growing stream of design research has been published that focuses on understanding the emotions of product users, and on the development of tools and techniques that facilitate an emotion-focused design process (for an overview, see Desmet and Hekkert 2009). Over the years, we have witnessed an increasing popularity of participatory design techniques in the Design & Emotion domain, reflecting a growing need of designers, both in practice and academia, to take on a more holistic view of the person of the user: user participation proves to facilitate and stimulate richness in the designed experiences. Academic design programmes are including new techniques in their curricula, and emotion-centred and participatory methods have secured a foothold in industrial practice, as well as interest in a growing part of the academic field.

The six papers presented in this issue voice this awareness, opening new possibilities to design for rich experiences that extend beyond the mere consumption experience. The papers have been developed from a selection of work that was originally presented at the 7th international Design & Emotion conference, held in Chicago, IL, on 4–7 October 2010. What binds the six contributions together is that each discusses opportunities and challenges that arise for experience-driven design when users have a guiding role in the design process. Direction proves to be the distinguishing term. In experience-driven design, the creative process directs the resulting user experience. With codesign, users in turn direct this creative process. Direction thus generates a cycle, in which experience plays a part on a variety of levels. In this context, the term ‘experience’ harbours three different concepts: momentary affect, cumulative knowledge, and meaningful events (for more extensive discussions, see Forlizzi and Battarbee 2004, Schifferstein and Hekkert 2008, Hassenzahl 2010). We draw on the German language to distinguish between these concepts succinctly:

•	Erlebung: ‘I experience joy when sitting in my garden’. This refers to immediate moment-by-moment affective responses.
•	Erfahrung: ‘I have a lot of experience in maintaining gardens’. This refers to expertise, in the form of first-hand knowledge.
•	Erlebnis: ‘It was a nice experience to spend the day with my family in the garden’. This refers to overall experiences remembered after engaging in meaningful activities.

Emotion-focused design traditionally employed the first experience type (Erlebung). One can, for example, develop new technology with the intention to evoke positive emotions such as pleasant surprise, or to avoid negative emotions such as disappointment (Demir et al. 2009). In codesign practice, however, the second and third type of experiences are equally important. In the second experience type (Erfahrung), the user’s ‘experiential expertise’ is key to the codesign process: the founding principle of codesign in general, and user participation in particular, is that people (users) are ‘experts of their experience’ (Sleeswijk Visser et al. 2005), and can bring in domain knowledge unavailable to the rest of the design team. The third experience type (Erlebnis) is narrative by nature, involving many smaller and contextualised momentary experiences, as, for example, in ‘experience design’ according to Pine and Gilmore (1999). Theme parks, with their highly orchestrated user experiences, are an extreme example. In the words of Hassenzahl (2010, p. 8): ‘An experience is a story, emerging from the dialogue of a person with his or her world through action.’ In user participation processes, this dialogue, which starts with the first moment of participation, feeds into the overall experiential storyline.

Because these three experience types interact in the creative process, codesign stimulates the creation of dynamic and rich experiences that bolster the product's raison d'être. This richness, in turn, affects the momentary product experience (Erlebung). A telling example is the emotion pride. This emotion is usually not included in lists of emotions that are generally experienced in response to consumer products. However, people experience pride in response to personal achievements (orachievements of those that they feel connected to). Products usually do not allow for much personal achievement because they are impersonal and ready made. Moreover, the way they should be used is often also predefined and scripted, andeven the subjective usage experiences are ‘precooked’. All of this changes when the user becomes an active member in the design process. The resulting design, then, is literally a personal achievement, enabling and even encouraging the user to be proud of the result. This a powerful experience, adding meaning to the product in allusage stages, and stimulating the sense that the product has become a part of ourselves.

The contributions

The intricate role of experience generates new communication challenges in codesign teams. Doing justice to the subtleties and complexities of experience requires modes of communication that carry the rich, multi-faceted and highly interwoven structure of people's lives, going beyond abstract principles. Van Rijn et al. provide evidence for the significant contribution of this kind of rich information in design processes. They compared the process and outcomes in a design exercise that posedan empathic challenge: designing for children with autism on the basis of data at different levels of directness and abstraction (own observation, video record, scientific paper). They found that direct contact provides the most fitting designs, and whereas the creativity of those designers who had only abstract theory to go on ranged more widely than those with direct contact, that freedom produced solutions which were mostly inappropriate for the needs of this special group. With examples from diverse cases, Mattelmäki et al. show a variety of ways to engage designers with the needs and opportunities of users which they cannot readily imagine. They indicate that, besides rich information, an empathic understanding also requires active participation of the ‘receiver’ of the information, which implies an open-endedness to the communication. Ho et al. propose that designers may not always be sensitive to this required open-endedness. They found that novice designers can have difficulties with suspending their role as ‘experts’ and approach the users as passive information providers, with the risk of generating stigmatising designs. These authors stress thatdesign students should be supported in developing their empathic skills and sensitivities to enable them to establish the balanced communication that is required in codesign processes.

The creative design process is a meaningful experience in itself. De Couvreur et al. introduce a ‘Design for (every)one’ framework, an approach that embraces horizontal user innovation networks in the field of assistive technology. By focusing on user abilities, this approach requires users to develop their skills, and enables them not only to help themselves but also to contribute to something bigger, that is, a community of people that can benefit from their ideas. The resulting experience (Erlebnis) contributes to a sense of purpose and meaning that generates a sustainable experience, supporting the user’s well-being in all stages of the process.

Prototypes can provide a mutual language for the various people involved in the design team. The design case presented by Glasemann et al. demonstrates the communicative value of prototypes from the perspective of ‘unconscious communication’. Their case study illustrates how, for products such as diabetes support tools, patients can express subjective and affective factors in making prototypes of tools for their life situation, and can discuss the merits of these proposals. The design case presented by Van Dijk et al. demonstrates that the communicative value of prototypes can transcend user groups. They discuss a design case in which the role of ICT was explored in fostering social connectedness between people who are physically or geographically separated. Their intended users were children who have to stay in a hospital for a lengthy period of time, and their parents and friends at home. Confronted with difficulties in involving these users, they found a surprising solution by shifting the target group from children to the elderly. The users are different, but their experiences surprisingly similar.

Conclusion

We have seen that codesign practice introduces richness in experience that poses both challenges and opportunities for design teams and their creative processes. Codesign democratises experience. Users are partly directing the creative process, and therefore also the resulting experiences. At the same time, the designer will co-experience the creative process with the user. The term empathy in this context is of pivotal importance: the ability to be sensitive to the experiences (Erlebung, Erfahrung and Erlebnis) of co-creating users recurs in each of the contributions. In order to design a product or service for the experience of another person, the designer must be able to appreciate that experience from a first-person perspective. Such a perspective can be established by the designer and user being the same person, by an intensive collaboration, or by intensive, empathic, information. This spectrum of solutions, and their appropriateness for different situations, has been a growing theme in recent research. From the perspective of Design & Emotion, this calls for a holistic approach, including the functional and the affective, the personal and the general, and the social and the societal. The beginnings were with us ten years ago, the current contributions show how the field has rapidly established itself. The future promises to be enjoyable.

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the Design & Emotion Society and the Chicago IIT Institute of Design for organising the 7th International Design & Emotion conference. We especially want to thank Dr Judith Gregory for initiating this special issue, and for her valuable contribution in selecting and reviewing manuscripts. We acknowledge the authors and reviewers for their contributions. In addition, we express our gratitude to Rachel Bamber, Publishing Editor at Taylor and Francis, and Prof. Janet McDonnell, the Editor-in-Chief, for their support in our joint effort to produce this Design & Emotion special issue.