Don Norman: Emtional Design

In this video, Don Norman speaks to his audience about design where emotions have been used to alter, modify, or improve certain aspects of designs, to give designs, in an essence, a sense of artificial intelligence which imitates the human mind. He believes that designs based on emotions is leading us to the wrong path in the design world, as it makes simple tasks, like changing the volume on a car stereo, a lot more difficult than what it actually is, as given by the Mercedez Benz example depicted in the video.

The thought I found interesting about this video was that designers actually intend to make useless designs or designs which stand out, purely just on a social context. I still believe it to be quite a large waste of resources, time and money to manufacture and produce designs which are aesthetically stunning, however are functionally useless, like the gold plated version of Phillipe Starcks' Juicy Salif, which was not even made to be used, but rather to be talked about.

It was interesting to find that emotions have become a main factor when designing products, usually in the context on fuctionality, as a mimic to human emotions, or to suppress the unwanted human emotions, such as fear when driving at high speeds.

Emotional design can be seen in many aspects of the design world today, it may not necessarily be the most functional, or environmentally friendly, such as the Hummer car, or $13,000 watches, but they are designs which depict a certain status to the owner. Designs become conventions which the social community labels a user of particular designs to be in certain market or focus groups.

Industrial designers could find this video useful as it says a lot about the direction to which design is heading towards, and the constant failures resulting from it. It could possibly be a hint to other designers to either stay away from emotional designs, or to be an inspired by it, so that other designers can successfully implement emotional driven designs and rid humans of the constant negative emotions which we all do not wish for in our lives.