For some time now, designers have intuitively understood that products can elicit some strong emotional responses. In fact, Hartmut Esslinger, founder of frog design delivered a keynote yesterday at the World Design Congress that detailed his own life-long approach to injecting emotion into design. There's now even a cross disciplinary field, neuroeconomics, which endeavors to measure how people and that squishy thing between their ears process such decisions about brands and products.
Yet while the business of emotions has been understood as a concept, finding out where exactly those responses were taking place (within the brain) was still something of a mystery. That is until recently. What science is increasingly showing is that the same places in the brain that register comfort and contentment also happen to light up when people are shown familiar products and brands.
To that end, Gregg Davis, prinicpal and co-founder of Design Central, an industrial design company based in Columbus, Ohio, spent an hour explaining why the design community should redouble its efforts and try to tap into this emotional gold mine.
"We've been intrigued with the emotional connections people forge with products for long time," Davis said... but we always felt there was something missing in the ability to use this as a tool."
"…These are the kinds of things that are primal," he continued, and while, technically, there's no center in the brain for brand evaluation, there is a part where such decisions and judgements are regularly made.
Davis went on explain how the emotional responses people experience when, say, they meet someone new are remarkably similar to the emotions people typically go through when they see a product for the first time in a retail store.
From the snap judgments we make immediately about someone based on their appearance, to the more nuanced assessments that come after talking with them, people react to brands and products in a surprisingly similar way, says Davis. Translating this "emotional code" to make it useful to designers and businesses is the next step.
*Photo: Dell's crystal display.
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"We haven't been able to manage these complex inputs," says Davis, admitting that there will never be a universal formula, no spreadsheet with numbers you can refer to, to increase emotional response.
Put another way: "Buying an iPhone is always going to be different than buying a water heater," he said, and different markets will always present different motivations and varying emotional profiles.
That said, being able to transform products that are typically informed by rationale (such as a water heater) and make them stand out from other competitive products should in theory produce higher sales. Unfortunately, Davis didn't really explain how one would go about doing this except to say that it would involve understanding the user's "emotional DNA," which includes emotional biases and emotional potential. No small task. But if higher emotion does translate into higher returns, it may be one companies and design firms devote themselves to.
