Emotional Design - Donald A. Norman

Each day, I begin to see that designing is really about seeing, hearing, thinking and understanding at a higher level. I found this book useful for FORCING myself to read and think outside the box. Donald A. Norman wants us to understand the structure of the new design revolution and transforming our perspective on the art of designing at an emotional level. In our daily life, we always want to look good, no matter what happen, we always want to find something attractive and adorable even though we already knew such that thing does not mean anything to us. But that is the fact because attractive things certainly needed much by human compare to the ugly ones. BUT, sometimes people will choose the attractive one over the ugly one and sometimes certain people will choose the ugly one over the attractive one just because this kind of people can see all those ugly things as a good value.

Norman says when we like the look of an object, we are more willing to overlook its design flaws as opposed to using something with no flaws and an ugly design. Some ugly things are loved dearly, while other beautiful things might afford no attachment at all. Beauty, as they say, is in the eyes of the beholder. As we know, human beings are complex and difficult to understand but human beings also have excellent brain for designing, creating or to think creative and innovative. Norman takes a step further from his earlier work to investigate a three level hierarchy to the way our brains process which is the visceral, behavioural and reflective. In his epilogue he states that everyone is a designer. Norman is suggesting that we model our environment to meet our individual needs and in that sense we make design decisions every day about colour and space and context.

Donald A. Norman wrote this book because he want to show us about the emotions in our life and basically it is all about the emotional design. The main issue in this book is that emotions is needed in our life to understand the whole world wide and it is about how we learn a new things and how we supposed to learn that new things. First, I would like to talk about the positive and negative affect. One thing that we should know is when the designer who is relaxed or in a happy mood, he can design a good product or make some fun product. Totally, this book is about exploring how people interact with things when human emotions are taken into account. I like the focus on the importance of emotions. The first three chapters were interesting to me. Norman focuses this time on the aesthetics of objects and the impact it has on their usability.

"With positive affect, you are more likely to see the forest than the trees, to prefer the big picture and not to concentrate upon details. On the other hand, when you are sad or anxious, feeling negative affect, you are more likely to see the trees before the forest, the details before the big picture" (Norman, 2005: 26). Well, is it something like, when I feel distracted by a problem, I become too worried about a thing? These lines have left me a question. A very big question I must discover the answer. However, I have my own idea that negative state will make me more sensitive and responsive to danger.

According to Norman, people always try to make a decision based on what affect their life and they are being able to use their senses and mental powers to understand what is happening or to make a decision in their daily life. For example, a beautiful set of old mechanical drawing instruments greatly appealed to Norman and a colleague. They evoked nostalgia (emotion), even though they both knew the tools were not practical to use (cognition) anymore. He changed the concept for application in design which is have three dimensions. The three dimensions have new names which is visceral, behavioral and reflective level. Norman wants to show us that design of any objects are based on all three dimensions therefore all designers should used all these three level (dimensions) to design something good. Because according to him, without all three level (dimensions), there will be no good design in this world. The reflective dimension is about the satisfaction. Means, when that person bought some new product and started to use it, at the end of the usage, that person will decide whether it is good to continue use the product or stop to use it based on individual satisfaction. He said, emotion plays the main role in consumer purchases. Understanding the three parts of design helps a business make the most of their product designs and marketing efforts.

On The Aesthetic Education of Man

The Letters on Aesthetic Education offer an interpretation of the development of the individual and the parallel development of Western civilization. These interpretations focus on the conditions that allow for mental health in a human individual and society and especially demonstrate the crucial role of artistic experience in healthy human development. Friedrich Schiller was influenced by his contemporary Immanuel Kant and goes on to explore the implications that emerge from our understanding of the sublime in relation to culture, society and our own edification. His 'letters' are insightful of a man who wants his readers to make a difference to the ennoblement of life rather than descend to the easy pursuit of the superficialities that are just as obvious in our lives today. Basically, Schiller took Kantian idealism and crossed it with a popular format because they are written as "letters". Unlike Kant, you can actually read Schiller, since this book is only 140 pages long. The reason for this book is still relevant is that Kantian idealism underlay most popular manifestations of Romanticism but most people who consider themselves as "Romantics" literally have no idea what Kantian idealism means. Of course myself included. Thus, by reading this one 140 page book, you can kind of get a handle on the relationship and gain a better understanding of artists who are influenced by this time period.

On The Aesthetic Education Of Man is a philosophical enquiry into the source of art and beauty describing how art and beauty are related to human freedom. According to Schiller, freedom is attained when the sensual drive and rational drive are fully integrated and when the individual can allow both drives to be fully expressed, without being constrained by them. In the fourth letter, Schiller claims that if man is to attain the state of reason and still preserve his freedom, “this can be brought about through both these motive forces, inclination and duty, producing completely identical results in the world of phenomena; through the content of his volition remaining the same whatever the difference in form; that is to say, through impulse being sufficiently in harmony with reason to qualify as universal legislator”.

Schiller offers us On the Aesthetic Education of Man as an aesthetic object and with that places his work in a strange position. Yet, as much as Schiller would like us to perceive his work as an aesthetic object, we wouldn’t be justified in doing so. In the very last letter, Schiller undermines his own argument about the ‘innocence’ of the aesthetic object, reducing the aesthetic to notions of refinement and decorum thereby disclosing the illusory freedom it offers. Schiller assumed that beauty is an aesthetic unity of thought and feeling, of contemplation and sensation of reason and intuition of activity and passivity of form and matter. In Schiller’s philosophy, the state of true aesthetic freedom is achieved by the "play drive" which mediates between the "material drive" and the "formal drive" which is allowing both sides of human nature to be fully developed and unified.

Schiller’s focus on freedom in his definition of the aesthetic already hints at the tendency of his aesthetic to slip into the sublime insofar as freedom is typically associated with the sublime rather than with the beautiful object. According to this interpretation, Schiller was deeply affected by the consequences of the French Revolution and accepted Goethe’s belief that the poet ought to remain a stranger to his age, that art need not fulfil a moral function. Although Schiller claims that semblance is independent from truth and does not threaten it, he fails to dissociate the two completely. Thus, although Schiller would like us to believe that his only motive for making the aesthetic autonomous is to reveal its transcendental ground, we might ask whether his real motive might not be a certain disappointment.

In Schiller's aesthetic philosophy, human nature consists of two realms of being that which persists and that which changes. Schiller says that the unchanging self is not determined by time but that time is determined by the unchanging self. Every human being is a person who is situated in a particular situation. According to Schiller, aesthetic education can produce not only an increased level of awareness or receptivity to the world but can also produce an increased intensity in the determining activity of the intellect.

Schiller tries to identify the aesthetic as precisely as we saw, he cannot preserve its purity and self-sufficiency and keeps overstepping the boundary that is supposed to separate it from the realm of form and reason. Schiller is as concerned with asserting man’s dignity (freedom) as Newman for whom the defence of that dignity is the ultimate subject matter of art. Similarly, if as Schiller suggests, the aesthetic is already given in us as a part of our nature, how can we deceive ourselves that aesthetic education is necessary, given that this education requires us to fragment our nature?