TEN: 10 years of Design & Emotion (Workshop Part I)

The Design & Emotion Society is celebrating this year their 10^th anniversary and they decided to organize an event at the Delft University of Technology to commemorate this milestone.

“TEN – 10 years of design and emotion” was a one day workshop held at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering on the 28^th of August and luckily I was there to participate. In this post I’ll explain what the workshop was all about and I’ll give a brief explanation of what we did in the first half of the activity. In a later post, I’ll show some of the results that were obtained at the end of the day.

The organizing team of the TEN workshop

The workshop

The workshop was organized as a one full day activity by the Design & Emotion Society in collaboration with the TU Delft and sponsored by KLM, Unilever and Philips. It was a crash course on the basics of design for emotions and ultimately the goal was to put them in practice with quick designs that could evoke a specific emotion on the user. Before the workshop, participants were asked to complete two introductory assignments in order to familiarize themselves with the domain we would be working on.

There were a total of 200 master students taking part of the workshop and they were divided in groups of 3 and given a specific assignment out of the following:

Unilever: Conceptualized dried soup.

“Soup is served by the mothers as token of love for their family, yet dried soups provide a short-cut and have an unnatural and industrial perception. Mothers experience guilt when preparing dried soups as they feel they are not being a good mother that cooks food from unprocessed ingredients. Design includes soup product and packaging.”

Philips: Conceptualize an iron

“Taking care of clothes is a way for women to express their love and care for their family. However, the process of ironing does not feel at all like caring, and the iron is not a friendly tool.”

KLM: Conceptualize an airplane “convenience area”

A convenience area is a place to recharge physically and/or mentally during a flight. Media and (food or non-food) retail ideas can be included in the concepts. Restriction: the layout of the galley is given.

: A coaching session with one of the groups

The process

My group (composed of Igor Jacobs, Giulia Bazoli and myself) was assigned the Philips case (ironing), so I will continue explaining the process as we followed it with this specific assignment in mind.

First of all, some key insights given during the introductory lecture:

Emotions are expressions of the “relational meaning” – the impact of the product on one’s personal well-being.
The points of reference in determining this relational meaning are our concerns.
We are emotional only about the things that matter to us – thus about the things that support or threaten our concerns.

During the workshop, each group would also receive coaching sessions in which they could share their ideas and get feedback from the experts present.

Concern types

In order to better understand the above, it is a good idea to explain the different types of concerns that people may have.

GOALS are our aspirations; the things one wants to get done and the things one wants to see happen. Goals vary from the abstract (for instance being loved or living healthily) to the concrete (reading a newspaper or quenching our thirst). We experience pleasure in situations that (potentially) help us to realize a goal, and frustration in situations that (potentially) block the realization of a goal.
STANDARDS are our beliefs, social norms or conventions of how we think things should be. Whereas goals refer to the state of affairs we want to obtain, standards are the states of affairs we believe ought to be. Many of us believe that we should respect our parents, for example, or wear clean clothes at work. Most standards are socially learned and represent the beliefs in terms of which moral and other kinds of judgmental evaluations are made.
ATTITUDES are relatively enduring, effectively coloured beliefs, preferences and predispositions towards (qualities of) objects and sensations. Some of our attitudes are innate and others are acquired. Examples of innate attitudes are a preference for sweet tastes and an aversion to bitter tastes and preferences for particular odours and for particular facial features and expressions.

Formulating a concern profile

Before we started, we were given 5 tips to help us along the way in this first part of the workshop:

Explore different types of concerns, i.e. goals, standards and attitudes.

Explore besides those related to the product (usage) also concerns related to the usage situation.

Explore what level of concern abstraction is more inspiring

In the concern profile, each concern starts with I (or we, they, people, dogs, chairs, etc) want (or should, like, aspire, etc.)…

To be inspirational, select concerns that are relevant, but avoid those that are over-obvious.

So, our first task was to identify some of the stakeholders involved in the design case, and eventually to select one of them as our focus. We performed a quick brainstorming to try and identify who could be involved in the ironing process.

We decided to concentrate our effort on two types of people:

Mothers
Young people doing their own ironing for the first time in their lives

And we created a list of possible concerns for them.

Concerns of a mother:

“I want to finish quickly”

“I want people to notice the effort”

“Ironing should be a safe activity (for myself and others)”

“I want my loved ones to look neat because I care for them”

“I want my loved ones to notice I love them”

“Chores should not be a burden, they should be easy to perform”

Concerns of someone ironing for the first time:

“I want to do a good job”

“I want to look neat for myself”

“People aspire respect from others by looking neat”

“I want to care care of my own things to know I can do it”

“People that care for their own things are seen as independent”

“I want to do it quickly”

So by this point, we already had two stakeholders in which to concentrate and we identified some of their possible concerns, and then… it was lunch time 😉

In my next post I will explain how we used these concern profiles to design products that could generate a specific emotional reaction on our two stakeholders.