Emotion finds a way to users from designers: assessing product images to convey designer’s emotion

Abstract

Along with a growing interest in emotional design and pleasurable products, it is necessary to understand how designers are able to maintain emotional impacts of their design solutions throughout the design process, and how these solutions can find a way to evoke the intended emotional feeling of the users. The present study first examined emotional responses to early design sketches, and how these responses could be used to check if the emotional impacts of their early sketches were observed in a combinative way of cognitive-linguistic and physiological approaches. Based on the findings of the empirical study, we further discussed how the emotional differences of product images would be generated by product forms. We figured out that good form factors of early design sketches might elicit positive feelings and high arousal states, thereby incorporating semantically meaningful features in the product images.