Emotional Design (33 page)

Ortony, Revelle, and I were developing a theory of emotion, and as we made progress, I realized that the approach could be applied to the field of design. Moreover, the work finally enabled me to resolve the apparent contradictions between my professional interest in making things usable and my personal appreciation of aesthetics. So I discarded that first book manuscript and started anew, this time using the theoretical work on emotion as a framework. Once again, I tried teaching the material, this time with far better success. My students in that first class, and then the ones who tried out the manuscript of this book, were all most helpful in transforming unrelated notes into coherent manuscript.

Along the way, my professional colleagues have provided considerable advice and resources. Danny Bobrow, my long-term colleague, with intelligent pokes, prods, and irritating questions where he would find the flaws in any argument I attempted. Jonathan Grudin, with a continuous flow of email, oftentimes from dawn to dusk, with comments, papers, and critiques. Patrick Whitney, head of the Institute of Design in Chicago, who invited me to serve on his board and provided
both insightful comments and access to the industrial design community. Many of the faculty of the Institute of Design have been most helpful: Chris Conley, John Heskett, Mark Rettig, and Kei Sato. Nirmal Sethia, from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, has been a continual source of contacts and information: Nirmal seems to know everyone in the field of industrial design and has made sure I was up-to-date.

 

 

THE POWERFUL team of interaction designers Shelley Evenson and John Rheinfrank always provide great insights (and John is a great chef). I thank Paul Bradley, David Kelly, and Craig Sampson of IDEO and Walter Herbst and John Hartman from Herbst LaZar Bell.

Cynthia Breazeal and Roz Picard from the MIT Media Laboratory provided numerous useful interactions, including visits to their laboratories, which contributed considerably to chapters 6 and 7. Rodney Brooks, head of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT and a roboticist, was also a great source of information. Marvin Minsky, as always, provided much inspiration, especially with the manuscript of his forthcoming book,
The Emotion Machine.

I tested many of my ideas on the several bulletin boards of the CHI community (the international society for Computer-Human Interaction), and many respondents have been most helpful. The list of correspondents is huge—hundreds—but I am especially indebted to my fruitful conversations with and suggestions from Joshua Barr, Gilbert Cockton, Marc Hassenzahl, Challis Hodge, William Hudson, Kristiina Karvonen, Jonas Löwgren, Hugh McLoone, George Olsen, Kees Overbeeke, Etienne Pelaprat, Gerard Torenvliet, and Christina Wodtke. I thank Kara Pernice Coyne, Susan Farrell, Shuli Gilutz, Luice Hwang, Jakob Nielsen, and Amy Stover of the Nielsen Norman group for their lively discussions.

Jim Stewart from Microsoft's XBOX division provided discussions of the game industry and the XBOX poster for my walls (“Go outside. Get some air. Watch a sunset. Boy, does that get old fast.”).

The book slowly transformed from eighteen disorganized chapters into the present seven chapters, plus prologue and epilogue, through two massive rewrites, guided by Jo Ann Miller, my editor at Basic Books. She worked me hard—fortunately for you. Thanks, Jo Ann. And thanks to Randall Pink for diligently gathering final photographs and permissions.

Although I have left out many who helped during the long gestation period for this book, my thanks to all, named and unnamed, including all my students at both Northwestern University and the Institute of Design who helped me clarify my thoughts through the various revisions.

 

Don Norman Northbrook, Illinois

Notes

3 “If you want a golden rule” (Morris, 1882. Quotation is from Chapter 3, “The Beauty of Life,” originally delivered before the Birmingham Society of Arts and School of Design, February 19, 1880.)

6–7 “no new vehicle in recent memory has provoked more smiles” (Swan, 2002)

7 “It starts out with slight annoyance” (Hughes-Morgan, 2002)

12 “The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio studied people” (Damasio, 1994)

13 Parts of this chapter were published in
Interactions
, a publication of The Association for Computing Machines (Norman, 2002b)

17 “two Japanese researchers, Masaaki Kurosu and Kaori Kashimura” (Kurosu & Kashimura, 1995)

17–18 “Japanese culture is known for its aesthetic tradition” (Tractinsky, 1997)

18 “So Tractinsky redid the experiment” (Tractinsky, 1997; Tractinsky, Katz, & Ikar, 2000)

18 “It requires a somewhat mystical theory” (Read, 1953, p. 61)

19 “The psychologist Alice Isen and her colleagues” (Ashby, Isen, & Turken, 1999; Isen, 1993)

21 “My studies of emotion, conducted with my colleagues” (Ortony, Norman, & Revelle, 2004)

31 “two words in the mythical language Elvish.” Tolkien's books are, of course, well known (Tolkien, 1954a, b, c, 1956). This particular experiment was done in my classroom by Dan Halstead and Gitte Waldman (in 2002). They described the sound symbolism of Tolkien and, in a class demonstration, showed that people who had never heard Elvish could still reliably determine the meaning of its words.

32 “a sound symbolism governs the development” (Hinton, Nichols, & Ohala, 1994)

41 “almost 20,000 in the United States alone.” Magazine Publishers of America, figures for the year 2001.

46 “
kitsch
.” The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Copyright © 1999, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/

46 “Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded.” (Berra & Horton, 1989)

47
The Meaning of Things
(Csikszentmihalyi & Rochberg-Halton, 1981)

48 “They are the first two chairs me and my husband bought.” (Csikszentmihalyi & Rochberg-Halton, 1981, p. 60)

48 “Household objects,” (Csikszentmihalyi & Rochberg-Halton, 1981, p. 187)

49 “when I walked through the exhibits on display at the San Francisco Airport.” The San Francisco Airport Museums:
http://www.sfoarts.org/
.

49 “The marvel of souvenir buildings” Text from the exhibit (Smookler, 2002)

52 “With every photo there is a story” (Cowen, 2002)

53 “Frohlich describes the possibilities this way” (Cowen, 2002)

54 “But put Asians in an individualistic situation” (Kitayama, 2002)

55 “the Heathkit Company.” The company has stopped making kits, although it still makes electronic learning materials. See the history at
http://www.heathkit-museum.com/history.shtml
.

55 “As the market researchers Bonnie Goebert and Herma Rosenthal put it” (Goebert & Rosenthal, 2001. The quotations are from Chapter 1: Listening 101, the value of focus groups.)

57 “Pirsig's
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”
(Pirsig, 1974)

57 “The
American Heritage Dictionary
defines
fashion . . .” The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition,
Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

60 “Emotional branding is about building relationships.” Sergio Zyman, Former Chief Marketing Office of Coca-Cola. In the foreword to
Emotional Branding
(Gobé, 2001).

60 “Emotional branding is based on that unique trust that is established with an audience.” (Gobé, 2001. From the preface, page ix.)

63 “I remember deciding to buy Apollinaris.” Email from Hugues Belanger, in response to my query. May 6, 2002. To see the bottle, Belanger said: For a picture of the bottle, check out
http://www.apollinaris.de/english/index.html
(mouse over “Products” and click on “Apollinaris Classic”).

64 “Walk down a grocery aisle.” From the web site of “The Bottled Water Web”:
http://www.bottledwaterweb.com/indus.html
.

64 “Package designers and brand managers.” From the “Prepared
Foods.com
” web site:
http://www.preparedfoods.com/archives/1998/9810/9810packaging.htm
.

64 “Almost everyone who enjoys TyNant.” From the TyNant web site:
http://www.tynant.com/clients.htm
.

69–70 “The principles of good behavioral design are well known . . . I laid them out in my earlier book,
The Design of Everyday Things”
(Norman, 2002a). Also see: (Cooper, 1999; Raskin, 2000).

74 “Understanding end-user unmet and unarticulated needs.” From a Herbst LaZar Bell case study of the “Penguin” platform stepladder, sent to me mid-2002.

78 “Here, try this.” The Tech Box is described in more detail in Tom Kelley's book about IDEO (Kelley & Littman, 2001, pages 142–146).

86 “Swatch Is Design” Student guide from the Swatch web site (Swatch Watch Corporation)

87 “In his important book about” (Coates, 2003, pp. 2.) 91 “The main goal in designing the Coaches Headset.” Steve Remy, senior mechanical engineer and project manager for HLB, quoted in a press release for PTC's Pro/ENGINEER software that was used by HLB for the design. (July 23, 2001. Found at
http://www.loispaul.com
.)

92 “To the uninitiated” Copyright © 2002 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission. (St. John, 2002)

93 “When you're wearing a thousand-dollar suit” (Rushkoff, 1999, p. 24) 95 “Paco Underhill's book” (Underhill, 1999)

96 “a wildly ambitious, hugely expensive science fiction allegory” and also, “symbolism ran such riot.” From A. O. Scott's
New York Times
review of the restored movie (Scott, 2002).

98 “The brilliant conceptual artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid” (Komar, Melamid, & Wypijewski, 1997)

98 “Perfectly ‘user-centered design.'” Taken from Lieberman's essay “The Tyranny of Evaluation,” available on his web site. I changed the phrase “user-centered interfaces” to “user-centered design” (with his permission) to make the point apply much more generally. (Lieberman, 2003)

99 “Professor Hiroshi Ishii of the MIT Media Laboratory runs back and forth.”
Ishii's work is best seen at his web site:
http://tangible.media.mit.edu/index.html
. The bottles are described in (Ishii, Mazalek, & Lee, 2001; Mazalek, Wood, & Ishii, 2001).

99 “Imagine trying to play table tennis on a school of fish” (Ishii, Wisneski, Orbanes, Chun, & Paradiso, 1999)

100 “funology” (Blythe, Overbeeke, Monk, & Wright, 2003)

102 “the cook . . . would naturally be disappointed” (Ekuan, 1998, p. 18)

103 “A sense of beauty that lauds lightness” (Ekuan, 1998, pp. 79–81)

103 “with articles and books on ‘positive psychology' and ‘well-being' becoming popular” (Kahneman, Diener, & Schwarz, 1999; Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000; Snyder & Lopez, 2001)

103 “positive emotions
broaden
people's thought-action repertoires” (Fredrickson & Joiner, 2002). This quotation ends by referring the reader to other works by Fredrickson, in particular (Fredrickson, 1998, 2000).

104-105 “The book
Emotional Branding
” (Gobé, 2001)

105 “Patrick Jordan builds on the work of Lionel Tiger” (Jordan, 2000; Tiger, 1992)

108 “He picked up the hammer and ate it.” See Coulson, King, & Kutas, 1998, although the particular example I made up isn't in this study.

109 “Pattern 134: Zen View” (Alexander, Ishikawa, & Silverstein, 1977, pp. 641–3)

109 “the parable of a Buddhist monk.” I thank Mike Stone (at
www.yawp.com
) for reminding me of the parable. The quoted description of the parable comes from his discussion group posting.

111 “The seductive power of the design” (Khaslavsky & Shedroff, 1999, p. 45)

113 “On the napkin.” Text accompanying the “collector's edition” of the juicer (Alessi, 2000).

113 “Fortunately, Khaslavsky and Shedroff have done the analysis for me.” The lengthy quotation is from Khaslavsky & Shedroff, 1999, their Figure 1, p. 47 © 1999, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Reprinted by permission. (I have reformatted the text, but the words are the same.)

115 “Music plays a special role.” An excellent review of these issues—and the source for this paragraph—is Krumhansl, 2002, especially note p. 46.

117 “All cultures have evolved musical scales.” This section draws heavily from Krumhansl (2002) and Meyer (1956, p. 67).

120 “The designers of the Segway.” Descriptive material for the “Segway Human Transporter.”
Amazon.com
site. December 2002. Also, personal conversation with Dean Kamen, the inventor of Segway, February 25, 2003.

123 “the passions aroused in film” (Boorstin, 1990, p. 110)

124 “The vicarious eye puts our heart in the actor's body” (Boorstin, 1990, p. 110)

125 “the social scientist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990)

126 “The word ‘voyeur'” (Boorstin, 1990, p. 12)

126 “The voyeur's eye demands.” Boorstin (1990), pages 13, 61, and 67.

127 “It can ruin the most dramatic moment” (Boorstin, 1990, p. 13)

129–130 “Overslept, woke at 8:00.” From an interview with Will Wright, game developer of the Sims, conducted by
Amazon.com
Computer Game Editor Mike Fehlauer:
http://www.playcenter.com/PC_Games/interviews/will_wright_the_sims.htm
.