Book Reading #3: Emotional Design

Perspective Comparison - Design of Everyday Things and Emotional Design

For this assignment, we were asked to contrast the perspectives of two books, Design of Everyday Things and Emotional Design. Both books were written in different contexts and with different considerations in mind. What both had in common though were that they both helped understand how to make a product better.

In Donald Norman's book, Design of Everyday Things, he focused on design and how function and the process behind that design should be easy to use. It should require limited thought on the user's mind compared to a complicated process, and should also put the ability to easily use the product as the most important concept. Confusing products and hard to understand instructions only make the process worse and so he conveys that is important to have a good design when initially creating the product. That way the product will easily appeal to the user himself.

In the book Emotional Design, the author focuses mainly on emotion and aesthetics of a product. In the previous book, I found that the psychological aspects of his writing were the most interesting. What interests me about this book is that it goes a step further and really explores that aspect a bit further. Specifically, the emotions and aesthetics have a lot to do with psychology and how a person thinks. In this book, he mainly focused on how two objects that function exactly the same would have different results if one object was more aesthetically pleasing than the other. He gave a few examples, one of which the ATM machine example, where he demonstrated that very same aspect. Even though function remained the same, people commented how the more pleasing ATM was easier to use. He also talked about different levels of brain activity (visceral, behavioral, and reflective), and how those functions links to how a person feels. I found when talking about this that both focus and creativity should be utilized to their fullest.

I am really interested in seeing where the psychological side to this book leads.