Book Reading #2: Emotional Design

        In this post, I compare and contrast the perspectives presented by Donald Norman in his books Design of Everyday Things and Emotional Design.

        In Norman's book, Design of Everyday Things, he takes the perspective of functional design. He talks about how the design of objects should be as simple as possible and its functions should be easy for a user to intuit without much thought. He goes through many examples of both bad design and good design throughout his book to reinforce the idea that functionality and ease of use is the highest priority when designing an object. In Design of Everyday Things, Norman never mentions aesthetics as a design property as he only goes over the mappings and layout of controls of objects and how that fits into design, rather than how an object looks or makes the user feel.

        In Norman's book, Emotional Design, however, he takes the perspective of aesthetically pleasing and emotion-inducing design. He talks about an experiment in Japan and Israel in which users were presented with two different ATM machines, one aesthetically pleasing and the other not, both with the same functionality, but users thought that the more aesthetically pleasing ATM machine was easier to use. Norman uses this study to start the chapter and talk about how good aesthetics have a positive influence on design. The rest of the chapter was spent talking about how the brain turns input into a response and the three levels of brain activity - visceral, behavioral, and reflective - and how the reflective level ties in to the other levels without having direct access to response. He explained how emotions effect creativity and focus and how designs can influence creativity and focus by exploiting certain emotions.

       The perspective Norman uses in Design of Everyday Things is a functional perspective, while the perspective he uses in Emotional Design is one of aesthetics and emotions. These two perspectives go hand in hand with good design, but one without the other does not a bad design make. Functional design is a great starting point, because it will be easy for someone to use a device if it is functionally sound and maps well conceptually. Emotional and aesthetic design is a method that goes above and beyond functionality to make the design 'feel' better to use and make users 'feel' like it works better simply because it looks better. A glaring example is Apple products that work well, but users think they are easier to use and work better simply because they 'feel' easier to use and they 'look' like they work better. Overall, both perspectives are important to good design and, when combined, can create optimally designed objects.