Idea Transcript
RATIONAL APPROACH TO EMOTIONAL DESIGN PROCESS Cliff Shin University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA
This poster will introduce emotional design process incorporating to cognitive science and computing emotional priority from industrial design junior studio project taught by the author and discuss how cognitive science and tool from statistic enhance design process and are transformed to emotional design process. There are several approaches to make emotional design process possible. The first one is called RexSy (Reason, Emotions, Interactions, and Synergy) and it comes from synergy created by emotions and interactions based on the reason, which developed by the author. The other one is analytic hierarchy process (AHP) by Thomas Saaty and it is the tool for computing the priority. By applying AHP for design process, the students were able to prioritize which emotions they should initiate to solve. The other tool is to construct a matrix to reach an emotion for the users. The last is to study face while the students were conducting the interviews to the users. Based on neuron-science, the muscle movements in the face could reveal when people have reaction by using muscle in the face. RexSy: A more clear understanding of how designers suspend rational thoughts and utilize a heightened state of creativity that embraces emotion (perception) in the early stages of the design process to shape a project’s direction. Once the students define the problems after brainstorming of problems, they construct fish-bone diagrams. They start unfolding in order of causes, reasons, and root reasons where “causes” is the biggest reasons, “reason” is a vehicle for the “cause”, and “root reason” is impetus for the vehicle. It is an effective and logical way for the students to be able to see “forest” and to recognize “trees” and “leaves” on the trees. After identifying the root reasons the students characterize the root reasons in order to interconnect with new emotions that could articulate a positive outcome and interaction that enhance the users experience from mundane routine to an activity leading to positive feeling. AHP: Embracing emotions in the design process increases the longevity of our subject-object relationships and make them more fulfilling. By integrating Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) developed by Thomas L.
Saaty into emotional design process, the designers can actually compute customers’ preference and provide the designers with percentile rather than relying on the customers’ expressions. Because AHP had constructed based on psychology and mathematics it has significant association to the emotional design process. Functional Matrix (FX): It is a matrix based on the proposed functions conveying additional reaction and responses and is called Functional Matrix (FX). The purpose of having FX is to encourage the designers deliberate among the features and investigate other phenomena that could occur from the features. Therefore, the designers avoid just adding features in the product, but the designers have an opportunity to see all the consequences with bigger scopes. Face Study: The experts can even tell if someone is lying by looking at the eye because the pupils change depending on emotions. Ekman P. and Friesen W stated in their book, “Unmasking the Face”, “In a sense this is paradoxical, because the face is very commending of attention. As the site for the major sensory input – sight, hearings, smell, and taste – and for the major communicative output – speech – it has great importance in social life (Ekman and Friesen 2003)”. True smile emerge spontaneously from our intuitive limbic system and activate both the mouth and eye regions. The corners of the mouth rise, the cheeks rise, and there is host of subtle muscle activity around the orbit of the eye socket. In contrast, have-a-nice-day smiles involve a pathway from the motor cortex, appear only around the mouth and can be consciously summoned at will. The lack of eye-muscle activity is why we say the eyes are the window to the soul; a place where faking it doesn’t come easily (Hill 2010). Good design values people and the public has becomes extremely aware of what inspires them in the marketplace. When a product is purchased based solely on its looks, it is clear that the advertising in magazines, newspaper, and broadcasting (combined with the overall design) were successful at evoking a strong emotional reaction. However, this sometimes intuitive decision making (based on an emotional response) is in fact not irrational but instead logical. References Ekman, P and Friesen, VW: 2003, Unmasking the Face, Malor Books, Cambridge, Massachusetts USA, p. 14 Hill, D: 2010, About Face, KoganPage, London. P. 63