Design and Emotion

Design is usually partly about emotion, and sometimes the emotional segment is pretty big. I read this post on BoingBoing about torturing a mechanical toy dinosaur -- the thing thrashes around, driving children to tears and women to discomfort -- and my first thought was that there was something unusual about this. But isn't that what toy design is all about?

Children like toys, but not all toys, at least not in the current environment of many, many available things to choose among. The choice of one toy over another is, as far as I know, somewhat mysterious, but it's certainly emotional. After all, we assume that children are generally more ruled by emotions than adults.

Many things are designed like toys -- that is, they may have some utility (even if we call them toys they often do something useful) -- and the choice among them, even for adults, is primarily emotional. Some objects were originally utilitarian, and have moved into the realm of almost pure emotion. And at least in the US, there are lots of things -- whole categories -- that we commonly call "toys". Most of these have, or at least can be claimed to have, some form of utility. Come on, you might need to go somewhere really fast, even if it's across that field after it snows...

The more I think about it, the more important emotion seems to be for design. Or at least for the acceptance of a particular design. People in the US have lots of different automobiles to choose from; most of the effort put into selling them addresses emotions. Same thing with clothes, watches, and the like.

There's a lot going on here, and I'm not going to recapitulate Maslow, Postman, and the like. But I find it fascinating that designing something for a child assumes that emotion is the main motivator, and designing, say, a powerful mobile device and its software generally addresses emotion only secondarily.

As designers, we sometimes practice a bit of denial of our own.