Don‘s new book is Emotional Design.

He uses lots of photos, so the following minimalist representation will not have the, um, emotional impact of his talk.

People have emotional reactions to, and relationships with, products. Positive examples: A tiny Sony camera and Mini Cooper.

We have two information processes: Cognition (understanding the world) and emotion (judges the world). There are three levels: Visceral (biological and pre-wired), behavioral, and reflective.

Bottled water is their bottles. A Perrier bottle is emotional. A cheap plastic one is behavioral. Those fancy blue bottles appeal to us viscerally.

The 1961 Jaguar E-type (the one in the MOMA) is designed viscerally.

Remote controls (channel clickers) are behavioral remote controls. He recommends the Harmony controller that doesn’t tell you “control your DVD” but “watch a movie.”

The car seat controllers that look like seats are behavioral design.

Hummers are reflective design, although their ads are visceral.

How dress is usually reflective design.

We often neglect sound in design.

People either hate or love the Apple iMac. “That’s a sign of great design.”

He tells us about the last two chapters of his book because people don’t like them.

The Honda robot looks like a person and there’s no reason for it. Robots ought to look like what they’re designed to do.

The Roomba is visceral in that it doesn’t fall off cliffs. But it’s called a robot primarily for marketing reasons. Don’s coffee maker is more of a robot – cost $1,000, has more motors in it than Roomba. and is smarter. It just doesn’t move. Robots will evolve by being connected to others, e.g., coffee maker connected to pantry and to dishwasher. There will have to be a mobile robot to connect them. That robot needs boredom and frustrated, a “weak method” for getting out of problems we wouldn’t have anticipated: “I’m stuck in a corner” so I’m frustrated, or “I’m sitting in front of the coffee machine for 20 minutes,” so I’m bored and will go find something else to do.

Q: What about Amori’s “uncanny valley”

A: The question is what your robot ought to look like. Coffee makers ought to look like coffee makers. Amori says that the more it looks like a person, the more unnerving it is. When it looks like a person but doesn’t act like one, there’s a valley and we hate it.

When I say “put emotions in machines,” I’m not saying we should put real human emotions. We should put in emotional systems appropriate to the machine. [He’s not thinking about machines feeling things, but rather having control systems that function the way emotional systems do.]

Q: [Mark Canter] Pure text or drop shadows and bevels?

A: It depends on the function. BTW: “Jakob Nielsen in his private life likes beautiful things.”

[Great talk. Provided a vocabulary for talking about an area of life, presented via great visual examples and a humble manner.]

Categories: Uncategorized dw