A Decade of Design and Emotion

This ‘emotional’ issue marks the 10th anniversary of the International Design & Emotion Society. In November 1999, the society was established after an event organized in Delft that became known as the first International Conference on Design & Emotion. It was an event that brought together a diverse group of 41 designers, design researchers, and design thinkers to share and discuss their views on the role of emotions in product design. The 13 position papers published in the proceedings of this event provide a succinct historical perspective on the ideas of some of the pioneers in the field (see Overbeeke & Hekkert, 1999). Since then, a steady growth in design research has been published that focuses on understanding the emotions of product users, and on the development of tools and techniques that facilitate an emotionfocused design process. The field is interdisciplinary by nature, and ten years after the first conference it is—more then ever—a challenge for students new to the field to gain an overview of the kinds of research represented by the design and emotion domain. By looking back at the proceedings of the Delft event, and referring to some of the exemplary statements made in those position papers, we would like to provide a basis for appreciating the wide variety of research initiatives that have been reported since that first conference. Note that back then, in 1999, the initiation of the Design and Emotion Society was not an isolated initiative; emotion was in the spirit of the times at the turn of the millennium. In that year, some now-famous seminal books came out that foreshadowed the current widespread interest in emotion. One of the most prominent examples is The Experience Economy, in which Pine and Gilmore (1999) were among the first to predict the development towards an economy driven by experiences, foreseeing that the world of goods and services was diminishing. They stressed that, in order to become or remain successful, businesses should learn to stage rich and compelling experiences. In a similar spirit, Jensen (1999) wrote The Dream Society, in which he signaled an increasing commercialization of human emotions. In his view, consumers would shift from buying products to the experiences and emotions conveyed by products. In line with this vision, Schmitt (1999) introduced the concept of experiential marketing, transforming the then-popular features-and-benefits approach into one that focused on sensory responses and emotions. Schmitt stressed that emotions are key to developing new products, communicating with costumers, and even in creating business partnerships. Also in the design profession some visionary books were published expressing an increasing awareness of the importance of user emotions. With The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, Cooper (1999) compellingly argued how the majority of available technological devices (videocassette recorders, car alarms, software applications, etc.) made users feel inadequate and frustrated by poorly designed user interfaces. Two years earlier, Picard (1997) advocated in her influential work Affective Computing that computerized systems would perform better when emotional competencies would be incorporated. Designers of electronic products, Dunne (1999) wrote in Hertzian Tales, must begin to think more broadly about the aesthetic role of their products in everyday life. He stressed that industrial design had much more potential to enrich our daily lives than was evident with the current designs, and argued how design could be used to improve the quality of our relationship to the artificial environment of technology. To facilitate these developments, Gaver, Dunne, and Pacenti (1999) introduced “cultural probes,” a research method that enables designers to obtain contextualized and rich insights into the experiences of difficult-to-reach user groups. One year later, Jordan (2000) published Designing Pleasurable Products. Traditional usability-based design approaches, he explained, were limited and even dehumanizing because they only focused on a person’s physical and cognitive abilities. As an alternative, he proposed a pleasure-based approach to human factors—addressing the relationship between people and products holistically, judging the quality of designs on the basis of the wider relationships between products and the people for whom they are designed. The bestseller status of these books demonstrates the initiation of a profound interest in the emotional aspects of designing, buying, and using products. But, ten years ago, these books mostly expressed imaginative visions yet to be embraced in education and practice. At that time, in our teaching of design at Delft’s Industrial Design Engineering faculty, we found that there was actually little room for experience or emotion in the educational curriculum. Students were thought to conceptualize and optimize products in terms of function, ergonomics, production, and economics. Nobody would argue against the