Emotional Design
At this time of year we sometimes get feedback from customers who have settled into their summer homes and are living for the first time with things they purchased from us earlier in the year. Happily, the comments are often sprinkled with the word “love,” which turns our musings this month towards exploring what it means to love an inanimate object such as a piece of furniture, and what elements go into stirring such strong positive emotion.
In his book Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things (New York: Basic Books, 2004), Donald Norman, a computer and psychology professor who is also a consultant on designing human-centered products, analyzes what’s behind people’s emotional reactions to viewing and using common objects such as tea kettles, wristwatches, and laptop computers. He is mostly concerned with our reactions to utilitarian objects rather than to artistic creations such as paintings or photographs which more directly represent and invoke the human experience and related emotions.
Norman proposes three different levels of the brain at which an everyday object can evoke emotion. The first level is Visceral – the immediacy of how something looks or feels, the symmetry of its lines and its aesthetic congruity. Whether the physical appearance of an object strikes a person as pleasing or ugly will generate a corresponding emotional response.
The second level of the interaction between objects and emotions is Behavioral. How well a gadget functions and whether it is pleasurable to interact with as we carry out a task can generate positive or negative emotions. An interesting finding is that when we have a positive aesthetic response to something such as a technological device, it also becomes easier to use at the behavioral level. This is because positive emotions can actually sharpen our cognitive problem solving processes.
Appearance and function of an object are the two basic levels that designers need to get right – a product usually has to look good and work well to become popular. Take an Old Hickory Morris chair, for example.
With its high back, multiple spindles, organic weave, and bark-on hickory frame it creates a composition that is a pleasure to look at, so is a success at the visceral level. It also scores high points at the functional/behavioral level, with a wide seat, a back that adjusts to different angles, and a footstool for ergonomic comfort.
While someone could readily love a Morris chair for its aesthetic appeal or its performance, there is a third, more subtle, but deeper route by which an object becomes entwined with our emotions. This is the Reflective level, which is the most complex means by which we establish a relationship with material possessions, and also the most difficult for designers to control. This level relates to each individual’s uniquely personal response to an object stemming from how it connects to his or her memories, knowledge, learning, background, and culture.
A good example Norman uses to distinguish the reflective level from the visceral and behavioral levels is the case of a reproduction painting. It may look exactly like the original artwork and perform the same decorative function in a room, but at the reflective level we know it is a knock-off, so we do not have the same emotional response to it as we do when standing in front of the original at a museum. Our reflective understanding of its prestige and place in history enhances its meaningfulness.
In addition to tapping into our knowledge of an attribute such as rarity, reflective level bonding with an object can develop over time as objects take on personal meaning by becoming associated with stories and occasions in our lives in which they have played a role. But designers are concerned with evoking a reflective response to an object at the point of purchase so that their product might have an opportunity to become part of a consumer’s life. How can something reach this level of our thoughts when we don’t even own it yet?
One route is through memory – not of a specific object that you have not yet lived with, but of something like it that may have been in your grandmother’s home, at a childhood summer camp, or even in historic photographs of the interior of an Adirondack Great Camp. Old Hickory sought to evoke nostalgia (the reflective level) for their new hoop arm chairs in the early 1900s with its Andrew Jackson label, relating a design of a chair to an American icon who was nicknamed Old Hickory for his toughness, thereby potentially establishing an emotional bond with the personality of their product.
In another interesting tactic, Old Hickory physically altered the appearance of their pine-and-hickory line of furniture in the 1930s by hitting the pine with chains to distress its surface. The dents and dings made the furniture look as worn as if it had already been in someone’s family for generations, thus potentially helping a customer warm up to it at an emotional level.
Another way that objects and emotions become entwined is in how they speak to our self-image. Objects reinforce how we view ourselves and how we want others to view us. The link between self and objects in the antiques world was always particularly clear at the Triple Pier Show, a New York City antiques show where we used to exhibit. Each pier had a particular focus. We exhibited on the pier that displayed folk art, country antiques, and Americana.
Another pier displayed mid-century modern design and funky vintage clothing, while dealers on the third pier carried fancy furniture and decorative accessories with lots of polished mahogany, brass, china, diamond jewelry, glitz and glam. No perceptive observer who walked through the three different piers several hours after the show had opened, when people had gathered back to linger on the particular pier where the merchandise most suited their tastes, would doubt for a minute the relationship between objects and people’s personal and public self-images.
It is a challenge, however, for designers to tap into the powerful forces of memory and self-image to develop personal bonding with their products. One amusing anecdote in Norman’s book recounts a meeting with a studio chief of a large industrial design firm trying to capture the elusive reflective level; in addition to making their products pleasing to look at and easy to use, he wanted to figure out how to make people connect personally and bond with the products on a reflective level.
His pursuit was to find materials that would age gracefully – think of a pair of blue jeans, a leather club chair, a copper pot, or a paperback book – thereby readily transforming a mass-produced item into something that developed character through the history of personal use. The challenge, however was that he was producing hand-held digital devices, and found that intentionally dropping, denting and scratching them just made them looked beat up, not more appealing. As far as we know, that particular design conundrum remains unresolved.
We’ll leave the challenge of giving hard plastic cases a warm, worn patina to the industrial designers, and be thankful that we are in the business of selling things that have already grown old gracefully so are pre-loaded with patina. Evidence of gentle aging personalizes an antique which can quicken our emotional response to it, thereby making something that has been “pre-loved” a likely candidate for us to bond with.
Designers such as Norman understand that the real value of the objects we live with every day is in fulfilling our emotional as well as our practical needs, in part by reinforcing our self-image, views and place in the world. It is not such a stretch to say that antiques dealers, too, are in the business of bolstering people’s positive emotions through acquiring and then transferring ownership of objects that are easy to love.
