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.