Emotional Design (32 page)

Still, this trend will continue. In the future, body parts, cases, and other parts of a design could be stamped, pressed, cut, or molded to order. Efficient assembly lines could put together customized structures. The choice of alternatives could expand. Manufacturing techniques are making it possible to extend the range of customization. This is the future.

4. Design our own products.
In “the good old days,” so it is said, we either made all our own things or went to the local craftsperson who would make something to our specifications, often as we watched. Some people still cherish those old days of folk arts—see, for example, John Seymour's wonderful description of them in his
Forgotten Arts and Crafts.
But as our needs get more complex and specialized in this ever-more technological, information-rich age, it is an impossible dream that many of us would possess the skills and time required to design and construct the objects required in everyday life. Nonetheless, it is not totally impossible to follow this route, and those who do reap many benefits. Some make their own clothing and construct furniture. Many people create and maintain gardens. Some even build their own airplanes or boats.

5. Modify purchased products.
This is probably the favorite and most widely followed method to make purchased items into personal ones. Harley Davidson motorcycles are famous in this regard: people buy one from the factory and then immediately send it off to a custom detailer, who completely alters it, the alterations sometimes costing more than the cycle itself (already expensive). Each Harley is therefore unique, and owners pride themselves upon their special designs and paint jobs.

Similarly, building custom sound systems in automobiles is now a major business, with proud owners showing off their sound systems in regional meetings and contests. So, too, with customization of automobiles, changing the electronics that control the acceleration and performance, altering the shocks, the tires and rims, and paint.

Of course, the home is perhaps the biggest site of customization. Newly constructed, identical-looking houses soon transform themselves into individual homes as their occupants change furnishings, paint, window treatments, lawn, and, over years, modify the house's structure, adding rooms, changing garages, and so on.

A space can only be made into a place by its occupants. The best that the designer can do is put the tools into their hands.

 

We are all designers. We manipulate the environment, the better to serve our needs. We select what items to own, which to have around us. We build, buy, arrange, and restructure: all this is a form of design. When consciously, deliberately rearranging objects on our desks, the furniture in our living rooms, and the things we keep in our cars, we are designing. Through these personal acts of design, we transform the otherwise anonymous, commonplace things and spaces of everyday life into our own things and places. Through our designs, we transform houses into homes, spaces into places, things into belongings. While we may not have any control over the design of the many objects we purchase, we do control which we select and how, where, and when they are to be used.

Sit down and decide where to put your coffee cup, your pencil, the book you are reading, and the paper you wish to write on—you are
designing. Even if this seems trivial and superficial, the essence of design is present: A set of choices, some better than others, perhaps none fully satisfactory. Possibly a dramatic restructuring to make everything work much better, but at some cost in effort, money, or even skills. Maybe if the furniture were rearranged or a new table purchased, the cup, pencil, book, and paper would fit much more naturally or the aesthetics would become more pleasurable? Once this is considered and a selection made, you are designing. Moreover, this activity is preceded by other designs; namely, the design of the building and the room, the selection of the furniture and its placement, and the location of the lights and their controls.

The best kind of design isn't necessarily an object, a space, or a structure: it's a process—dynamic and adaptable. Many a college student has made a desk by placing a flat-sided door on top of two filing cabinets. Boxes become chairs and book cases. Bricks and wood make shelves. Rugs become wall hangings. The best designs are the ones we create for ourselves. And this is the most appropriate kind of design—functional and aesthetic. It is design that's in harmony with our individual lifestyles.

Manufactured design, on the other hand, often misses the mark: Objects are configured and made according to particular specifications that many users find irrelevant. Ready-made, purchased items seldom fit our precise needs, although they might be close enough to be satisfactory. Fortunately, each of us is free to buy different items and then to combine them in whatever way works best for us. Our rooms fit our lifestyles. Our possessions reflect our personalities.

We are all designers—and have to be. Professional designers can make things that are attractive and that work well. They can create beautiful products that we fall in love with at first sight. They can create products that fulfill our needs, that are easy to understand, easy to use, and that work just the way we want them to. Pleasurable to behold, pleasurable to use. But they cannot make something personal, make something we bond to. Nobody can do that for us: we must do it for ourselves.

Personal web sites on the internet provide a powerful tool for people to express themselves, to interact with others all across the world, and to find communities that value their contributions. Internet technologies—such as newsletters, mailing lists, and chat rooms—allow people to congregate and share ideas, opinions, and experiences. Individual web sites and web logs allow personal expression, whether for art, music, photographs, or daily musing about events. These are all-powerful personal experiences that create strong emotional feelings. Here is how one person described her web site to me:

These personal web sites and web logs have become essential parts of many people's lives. They are personal, yet shared. They are loved and hated. They bring out strong emotions. These are truly extensions of the self.

Personal web sites, web logs, and other personal internet sites are prime examples of personal, nonprofessional design statements. Many people expend great amounts of time and energy in writing their thoughts, in collecting their favorite photographs, music, and video clips, and otherwise in presenting their personal face to the world. For many people, as with my correspondent, these personal statements represent them so intimately that it is inconceivable to imagine life without them—they have become an essential part of their self.

We are all designers—because we must be. We live our lives, encounter success and failure, joy and sadness. We structure our own worlds to support ourselves throughout life. Some occasions, people, places, and things come to have special meanings, special emotional feelings. These are our bonds, to ourselves, to our past, and to the
future. When something gives pleasure, when it becomes a part of our lives, and when the way we interact with it helps define our place in society and in the world, then we have love. Design is part of this equation, but personal interaction is the key. Love comes by being earned, when an object's special characteristics makes it a daily part of our lives, when it deepens our satisfaction, whether because of its beauty, its behavior, or its reflective component.

The words of William Morris provide a fitting close to the book, just as they provided a fitting opening:

IN SOME SENSE, this book is George Mandler's fault—surreptitiously sticking ideas in my head without my awareness. He hired me into the nascent Psychology Department of the University of California, San Diego, during the first year of the department's existence: the University itself had not yet graduated any students. Before I knew it, I had written a book (
Memory and Attention
) for his editorial series; developed an introductory textbook (
Human Information Processing
, written with Peter Lindsay), because of the course he had Peter and me teach; reconsidered my research on memory; and then entered the field of human error and accidents—whence my interest in design (under the philosophy that most human error is, in actuality, design error).

The Center for Human Information Processing—founded and run by Mandler—was host to the perceptual psychologist J. J. Gibson for a few summers, and these extended stays led to my many debates and
continual disagreements with Gibson. These were delightful disagreements, enjoyed by both of us, disagreements of the most fruitful, scientific kind, the kind that teaches. The combination of my interest in errors and my adaptation of Gibson's notion of affordances led to
The Design of Everyday Things.
(Had Gibson not died, I'm certain he would still be arguing with me, disagreeing with my interpretation of his concept, ostentatiously disconnecting his hearing aid to show that he wasn't listening to my rebuttals, but secretly smiling and enjoying every minute.)

George was both a cognitive psychologist and a major figure in the study of emotion. But even though I spent many hours debating and discussing topics in emotion with him, reading all his works, I never knew quite how to integrate emotion into my studies of human cognition and, especially, into my studies of the design of products. I even gave a talk at the very first conference on cognitive science, in 1979, entitled “Twelve Issues for Cognitive Science,” with emotion as number twelve. But even though I said we should study it, I didn't myself know how to go about doing it. My argument was convincing to at least one person in the audience: Andrew Ortony, now a professor at Northwestern University, tells me that he switched his area of research to emotion as a result of that talk.

In 1993, I left academia to join industry—serving as vice president at Apple Computer and then as an executive in other high-technology companies, including Hewlett Packard and an online, educational startup. In 1998, my colleague Jakob Nielsen and I established a consulting firm, the Nielsen Norman group, which has exposed me to a wide variety of products in several different industries. Eventually, though, academics drew me back, this time to the computer science department at Northwestern University. I now spend half time at the university, the other half with the Nielsen Norman group.

At Northwestern University, Andrew Ortony reawakened my dormant interest in emotion. In the decade that I was away from academia, much progress had been made in understanding the neuroscience and psychology of emotion. Moreover, while in industry, helping
bring out a wide variety of products, from computers to appliances to web sites, I became sensitive to the powerful emotional impact that designs can produce. People were often far less interested in how well something worked, or even in what it did, than in how it looked and how it made them feel.

Together with William Revelle, a personality theorist in the department of psychology, Ortony and I decided to re-examine the literature on affect, behavior, and cognition to try to understand this emotional attraction. As our work progressed, it became clear that emotion and affect should not be separated from cognition—nor those from behavior, motivation, and personality; all are essential to effective functioning in the world. Our work forms the theoretical background for this book.

At roughly the same period, Bill Gross of Idealab! started a new company—Evolution Robotics—to create robots for the home. He asked me to join their advisory board; before long, I was deeply engrossed in the science of robots. Robots, I soon determined, need to have emotions to survive; indeed, emotions are essential for all autonomous creatures, humans or machine. To my pleasant surprise, I discovered that a research paper I had written in 1986 with the neuropsychologist Tim Shallice, on “will” as a control system, was being used in robotics. Aha! I began to see how it all fit together.

As these separate approaches coalesced, applications dropped out naturally. Our scientific explorations led us to propose that effective processing is best analyzed at three different levels. This insight clarified many issues. It soon became clear that many of the arguments about the role of emotion, beauty, and fun versus marketing concerns, advertising claims, and the positioning of products—along with the difficulties of making a product usable and functional—were often debates across the different levels of processing. All these issues are important, but all have different levels of influence, with different time courses, and at different places in the cycle of purchase and use.

My goal in writing this book is to put these apparently conflicting themes into one coherent framework based upon the three-level theory
of affect, behavior, and cognition. With this framework I aim to provide a deeper understanding of the design process and the emotional impact of products.

So, thank you, George; thank you, Andrew; thank you, Bill.

 

 

THIS BOOK, like all my works, owes its existence to many other people. It started with the ever encouraging prods of both my patient agent, Sandy Dijkstra, and my business partner, Jakob Nielsen. No, not quite nagging, but continual reminders and encouragement. I'm always writing, always jotting things down, so out of these notes I created a manuscript entitled “The Future of Everyday Things.” But when I tried teaching this material to students at Northwestern University, I discovered it lacked cohesion: the framework that tied the ideas together came from the new work on emotion that I was doing with Andrew Ortony and Bill Revelle, and this was not part of the book.