Emotional design

Design and production

The term design is to indicate the process of product design, small or large, and it is used incorrectly to indicate shaped objects and refined operation.

Regardless of its function, have we ever wondered why an object of our house, for example, has a certain shape or color?
Why a consumer is willing to spend more money to buy a product that would find, with another brand, at a lower price?

By answering these questions we will also find the reason why the big brands of furniture, even in times of crisis, do not suffer of serious decline in sales.
By investing in research, in fact, they ensure a continuous product development to meet the needs of the community and always keeping in mind the quality of the product.
In our country, this phenomenon is related to the brand Made in Italy.

The basis of the design of a piece of furniture, an object of daily use or any other product, there is a thorough research on ergonomics and a detailed analysis of the society, so that it is perfectly in line with the needs of the user.

Creativity, together with the knowledge of production techniques, properties of materials, allow the designer to create products that are new and innovative, both in terms of performance and form.

This design method can be said to be the son of the Bauhaus, the German school of architecture, art and design in which the creation of a product with an end in itself was lost and has approached us with the need to present to the public functional objects, usable and nice to see.
In this way, the design becomes a multidisciplinary area in which the sociology takes a leading role in the design phase.

And here comes the emotional design, that branch concerned with the study and research needs of the user by incorporating them into the production process.

Emotional design

Before we talk about emotional design, one can not avoid speaking of Kansei Engineering, born in the seventies in Japan with the same goal: designers and engineers study the preferences and habits of groups of people and, using statistical techniques, they find correlations between physical properties of the product and the emotional response given by the users.

Assuming that the products meet the needs of even the emotional design pursues the quest for emotional design of a product, which in turn generate an emotion produces on the: studying the senses and the major emotions felt by man, such as happiness, discomfort, aggression, serenity, etc.., the designer dedicated to the design of a product that represents the perfect synthesis of the studies conducted by him.

Who spoke first of emotional design was Donald Norman, a psychologist and expert in economics, who in his book, entitled precisely Emotional Design, Why we love (or hate) everyday objects, traces, and denies his earlier studies on only to the functionality of the product, highlighting decisive it is in the selection and subsequent use of the product, the feeling and the emotion that it leaves us.

Many companies and designers, on the basis of the assumptions for this method of design, realize objects that can convey emotions between these definitely stand out Thun and Alessi, one of the Italian companies boasting more collaborations with well-known artists.

Choosing an emotional design object

So what do you consider when purchasing an item?
When we furnish a house or we buy everyday objects, in addition to analyzing the important price/quality relationship, we try to understand what emotions leave us if we are attracted to the color, the texture, the form, if you feel close to our way of being, we will surely be more willing to buy that product over another, and therefore more motivated to use it.