Both Richard Seymour and Don Norman are prolific designers in their own right. In the videos for this week’s assignment they speak about emotional design, telling stories about products and experiences and how they affect us emotionally. For this week’s blog post write about your thoughts on their ideas of emotional design. Give an account of emotional design that you connect to in your own life.
“We see things not as they are, but as we are.” This quote I think was really well said because the way we think that something is considered “beautiful” comes from what we know or what affects us/makes us think that it’s beautiful. Like you cannot say it’s beautiful without having a basis of what it means to you. Richard Seymour also said this about design but it was about how the human eyes are slaves to the first few seconds of what we see of an object. That becomes the winning or losing point of the design (also becomes the selling point). I feel like this is really true because often times the things that attract me the most comes from the instant I see it. If I look at it and there’s no feeling of attachment or desire then it must mean that I have no interest and there’s no emotion with it. In Don Norman’s Ted Talk he mentions three points (visceral, behavioral, and reflective) and I think most people can relate the most with visceral and behavioral because this comes to someone naturally right when you see it or first use it. When it comes to reflective this is more interesting because it goes deeper and more personal with the special meanings or memories one has with the design and it isn’t just on the surface level of how well it looks or works. There are many designs where it could be about the usage and attract a person but having a good story makes it much more meaningful and I think it would be a harder point to satisfy when designing.
An emotional design that I connect to in my own life would be Korean spoons. The design is simple, people can even consider it to be a normal spoon because all spoons work the way they do. But there is just something that I love about them. Maybe it is the way it feels when I hold them (long handle and very round head) that I appreciate or maybe it is the association with the act of drinking soup that is just different from a normal spoon. Whenever I see one I always want to buy it (at home I have like 4-5 different Korean spoons just for myself, and I have 2 here with me).
Korean spoon vs. normal spoon