I've been a bit busy, so I didn't post on the blog prior to last night's class. I'll try to post a longer post tonight to make up for it.
I’m really enjoying reading Norman’s Emotional Design. When I’m reading this book I’m constantly being reminded of other examples of design that I’ve read about or saw on TV, of which I’ll share a few in this blog posting. Norman begins Chapter 3 discussing the distinctive packaging of water bottles, and how design becomes the product. I’m not sure what Norman would say about this particular product, something definitely gets lost in translation.
The three levels that Norman discusses in the chapter are visceral, behavioral, and reflective. At the visceral level the physical dominates, so the look, the feel and sound are most important. The principles underlying visceral design are wired in, and are consistent across people and cultures. People go through these stages/questions when looking at a product designed to appeal to the visceral level: “I want it.” “What does it do?” “And how much does it cost?”. Norman raises some great examples of products that appeal to the visceral level, including iMacs, the VW Beetle, the Audi TT, and the Chrysler PT Cruiser.At the behavioral level performance matters. The most important components of the behavioral level include: function, understandability, usability, and physical feel. The key quote that jumped out at me was, “the first good step in good behavioral design is to understand just how people will use a product.” A lot of times designers/engineers are set in their ways, and they may not anticipate a need unless they observe it firsthand. There is a bit of a disconnect between designers and the people that they are designing their products, their intended audience. Norman also brings up numerous examples of products/innovations that designers have made in the past that even the designers didn’t anticipate their ultimate use, the classic example being Thomas Edison thinking that the phonograph would replace the need for people to dictate letters to one another.
Norman mentioned a design firm called IDEO in this chapter, which reminded me of a story that Nightline did on this company in 1999. In this piece, Nightline gave the designers a task: redesign a shopping cart. The designers started out brainstorming issues/problems associated with the traditional shopping cart. At the end of the challenge the designers came up with this design:
An interesting approach indeed. Some of the advantages of this new design were increased maneuverability of the cart, plastic carts to hold groceries, and a scanning device that would ultimately allow people to do a self-checkout. Will this be the shopping cart of the future. Maybe, maybe not. Consumers who tested the product were concerned about forgetting to scan the products, and many also remarked that they missed the human exchange with the checkout clerk (personally, I could do without this part of grocery shopping).
For the purposes of brevity, I’m going to just respond to a couple of the readings, namely, Chapter 4 from Norman’s Emotional Design and the reading “What is interaction design?”.
In Chapter 4 of Emotional Design one particular quote spoke to me, and that was “technology should bring more to our lives than the improved performance of tasks: it should add richness and enjoyment.” One thing that I was really happy to see discussed also in this chapter was the Japanese bento box, and how it truly is an art form. Having lived in Japan for awhile, this discussion appealed to me because someone else appreciated the aesthetics and beauty of the presentation of food as it happens in Japan. Truly some bento boxes are “art meant to be consumed”.
Another part of Chapter 4 which I feel will be helpful in designing our project will be Patrick Jordan and Lionel Tiger’s work on designing pleasurable products that Norman alluded to in this chapter. This can be summarized as the following:
physio-pleasure (which appeals to the visceral and behavioral levels)
socio-pleasure (which appeals to the behavioral and reflective levels)
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