TEN: 10 years of Design & Emotion (Workshop Part II)
A while back I wrote about the workshop organized by the Design & Emotion Society to celebrate their ten year anniversary, and I said I would make a second post explaining the rest of the workshop and the results… well, after finally making some time to sit down and go through it, here it is!
If you haven’t read the first part, I suggest you do so here, because that will make the coming lines much more clear to understand.
so, here it goes….
The Workshop – Part II
After the lunch break and having already decided on who our target users were and some of their concerns, we were given the task to develop two design proposals that would deal with the following emotions (one concept per emotion):
- Unilever (conceptualize dry soup): Pride & Hope
- Philips (conceptualize an iron): Joy & Pride
- KLM (conceptualize and airplane ‘convenience area’): Pride & Admiration
Formulating Appraisal Mirrors
The first step was to formulate what is known as ‘Appraisal mirrors’ for each of the emotions given to each team (Joy and Pride in our team’s case).
So what are ‘appraisal mirrors’ I hear you say? well, let’s start by defining what an appraisal is: a sense evaluation of a given stimulus’ significance for the personal well-being.
Appraisals connect stimuli to concerns, since a stimulus will only elicit emotions if they are appraised as supporting or harming one’s concerns (in other words, if you don’t care about the stimulus because it doesn’t relate to you then you wont feel an emotion).
Different emotions are elicited by different appraisals and the general appraisals related to the 3 emotions that the workshop was dealing with (joy, pride and hope) can be defined as follows:
Joy appraisal: Something happened that facilitated (progress towards) a goal realization.
Hope appraisal: There is a real (but uncertain) chance that something will happen that will facilitate goal realization.
Pride appraisal: My praiseworthy behaviour exceeds an internal or external standard.
So going back to those ‘appraisal mirrors’, these are general appraisals that have been specified for the situation in which the interaction with the design will take place. To formulate them all you need to do is re-phrase the general appraisals by including the usage situation and the concern profile.
An example of an appraisal mirror could be:
General appraisal for satisfaction: Something happened that confirmed an expected goal realization
Appraisal mirror: Something happened that confirmed the customer’s expectation of being pampered by the sales person in the situation of buying a new car.
Once we had our appraisal mirrors, we would use them to propose design ‘interventions’ that intend to generate the appraisals needed to elicit these specific emotions we want in our users.
Our group’s results
Our first appraisal mirror was for the mothers:
Concern: “I want my loved ones to notice I love them”
General appraisal for joy: Something happened that facilitated (progress towards) a goal realization.
Joy appraisal mirror: Something happened in the context of ironing clothes that facilitated other family members to notice how much the mother loves them.
And our design proposal was the following:
The second one was for people ironing their own clothes for the first time in their life:
Concern: “I want to do a good job”
General appraisal for pride: My praiseworthy behaviour exceeds an internal or external standard.
Joy appraisal mirror: The result of my ironing exceeds the external standard of properly ironed clothes.
and our design proposal for this second appraisal was:
Best concepts and workshop wrap-up
My 'Best concept award' certificate
After all the groups delivered their concepts, they were evaluated by a jury comprised of several members of the Design & Emotion society and representatives from KLM, Philips and Unilever. The jury made a selection of 3 groups per task (3 dealing with soup, 3 with ironing and 3 with the airplane convenience area) which were given a Best Concept Award distinction.
My group was selected as one of the best concepts in the domain of ironing and we were asked (along with the other 8 selected groups from the other tasks) to prepare a quick presentation of our ideas for the rest of the audience at the end of the workshop.
Unfortunately at this point of the day my camera stopped working and the videos that I was making of the winning designs were not saved properly, so I cannot share them with you, but underneath you can find some pictures from some of the most interesting ideas that I saw around.
As a last event for this wonderful workshop, the jury selected what they considered to be the group with the best idea overall, which unfortunately was not us… but a friend of mine, Jorge Peregrin Emparanza did make it to the top with a very nice new concept design for an iron which breaks with the established form associated currently with them (hard, rough and not very friendly) and replaces it with a curved form that makes handling feel more free and joyful.
The winning team with Jorge (sorry girls, I don't know your names)
A quick sketch of the winning idea
Underneath you can find a collection of some of the other results that were achieved by different groups. Sorry that I didn’t make any pictures of the designs involving the other tasks, but I was concentrated on those which were considered ‘my competition’.
And to wrap up this post, I have to say that all in all it was a wonderful day which taught us a lot about designing for emotions. During the time it was a bit stressful to try and comprehend all the concepts (such as appraisal mirrors) within such a short period of time if you were not familiar with the domain of product emotions, but in retrospective and giving it a bit more time to settle in our heads, it gave us some very nice bases to try and experiment on our own in our quest to reach people through truly emotional designs.
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