Earlier today, I watched Objectified, a great documentary about industrial design. It reminded me of how permanently-built and unsustainable many material things are, and how easy it is for us to form emotional attachments to objects with personal stories that we then are reluctant to part with. At the same time, I was thinking about different signs I could create for my public spaces project, signs that would tailor to people’s emotions in hopes of changing their behavior. For example, an elevator will have a speech bubble sign on it that says “I’m feeling tired today. Please take the stairs!” I started thinking about what the world would look like if our environment “spoke” back to us, even through inanimate signs. If we are taken off guard by a new friendly “Good morning!” thought-bubble-shaped sign on the door when we go to work, would our initial reaction be to say “Good morning!” back, before realizing that we were just about to talk to a door? Would we start noticing more things around us, and could we become more appreciative of them?
I applied the same idea to daily material things often taken for granted. What if your toaster told you when your bread was done, and when you said “thank you,” it replied “you’re welcome”? I’m not talking about creating robot appliances that will chat with you about your day and the daily news, but simple conversation pieces that made you feel like you were interacting with someone who just did you a nice favor. Not everyone can say “ah yes, this [insert thing] was passed down by my grandma and has considerable sentimental value to me,” but what if by giving certain products simple voices, you will form an emotional attachment to them and are less likely to replace them when something shinier comes along? (Come on, do you really need this muffin toaster that cooks your eggs too?)
In this age, we are constantly making things faster, smarter, smaller, bigger, better, building more and more until you walk into a Walmart Supercenter and suddenly you’re dizzy thinking about how much stuff there is. Some people don’t think twice about replacing a 1-year old digital camera when a newer model arrives, or even a 1-month old bag for another bag (of course, this one is absolutely perfect and you will never ever have to buy another bag ever again). Instead of designing new products that come equipped with these voices, we could build our own little toaster soul and equip it to our toaster, adding another kind of “creator bond” to our new relationship with the toaster. These low resolution social-emotional interfaces have the potential to increase awareness of our surroundings and make people more appreciative of what they have.
Update 1/19 – Suggested readings (thanks to all those who contacted me and suggested the following)
Cziksentimihalyi, M. 1991. Design and Order in Everyday Life. Design Issues, vol. 8, no. 1 (Autumn 1991), MIT Press, 26-34. (Works that have cited this paper)
Alex Taylor, Microsoft Researcher.
Blevis, E. 2007. Sustainable interaction design: invention & disposal, renewal & reuse. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (San Jose, California, USA, April 28 – May 03, 2007). CHI ‘07. ACM, New York, NY, 503-512. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1240624.1240705
Lim, Y., Donaldson, J., Jung, H., Kunz, B., Royer, D., Ramalingam, S., Thirumaran, S., and Stolterman, E. 2008. Emotional Experience and Interaction Design. In Affect and Emotion in Human-Computer interaction: From theory To Applications, C. Peter and R. Beale, Eds. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, vol. 4868. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 116-129. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85099-1_10
Norman, D. A. 2004. Emotional design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things. Basic Books, NY.
[Door picture from ArchiExpo]
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Emotional design and social interfaces
Earlier today, I watched Objectified, a great documentary about industrial design. It reminded me of how permanently-built and unsustainable many material things are, and how easy it is for us to form emotional attachments to objects with personal stories that we then are reluctant to part with. At the same time, I was thinking about different signs I could create for my public spaces project, signs that would tailor to people’s emotions in hopes of changing their behavior. For example, an elevator will have a speech bubble sign on it that says “I’m feeling tired today. Please take the stairs!” I started thinking about what the world would look like if our environment “spoke” back to us, even through inanimate signs. If we are taken off guard by a new friendly “Good morning!” thought-bubble-shaped sign on the door when we go to work, would our initial reaction be to say “Good morning!” back, before realizing that we were just about to talk to a door? Would we start noticing more things around us, and could we become more appreciative of them?
I applied the same idea to daily material things often taken for granted. What if your toaster told you when your bread was done, and when you said “thank you,” it replied “you’re welcome”? I’m not talking about creating robot appliances that will chat with you about your day and the daily news, but simple conversation pieces that made you feel like you were interacting with someone who just did you a nice favor. Not everyone can say “ah yes, this [insert thing] was passed down by my grandma and has considerable sentimental value to me,” but what if by giving certain products simple voices, you will form an emotional attachment to them and are less likely to replace them when something shinier comes along? (Come on, do you really need this muffin toaster that cooks your eggs too?)
In this age, we are constantly making things faster, smarter, smaller, bigger, better, building more and more until you walk into a Walmart Supercenter and suddenly you’re dizzy thinking about how much stuff there is. Some people don’t think twice about replacing a 1-year old digital camera when a newer model arrives, or even a 1-month old bag for another bag (of course, this one is absolutely perfect and you will never ever have to buy another bag ever again). Instead of designing new products that come equipped with these voices, we could build our own little toaster soul and equip it to our toaster, adding another kind of “creator bond” to our new relationship with the toaster. These low resolution social-emotional interfaces have the potential to increase awareness of our surroundings and make people more appreciative of what they have.
Update 1/19 – Suggested readings (thanks to all those who contacted me and suggested the following)
Cziksentimihalyi, M. 1991. Design and Order in Everyday Life. Design Issues, vol. 8, no. 1 (Autumn 1991), MIT Press, 26-34. (Works that have cited this paper)
Alex Taylor, Microsoft Researcher.
Blevis, E. 2007. Sustainable interaction design: invention & disposal, renewal & reuse. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (San Jose, California, USA, April 28 – May 03, 2007). CHI ‘07. ACM, New York, NY, 503-512. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1240624.1240705
Lim, Y., Donaldson, J., Jung, H., Kunz, B., Royer, D., Ramalingam, S., Thirumaran, S., and Stolterman, E. 2008. Emotional Experience and Interaction Design. In Affect and Emotion in Human-Computer interaction: From theory To Applications, C. Peter and R. Beale, Eds. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, vol. 4868. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 116-129. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85099-1_10
Norman, D. A. 2004. Emotional design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things. Basic Books, NY.
[Door picture from ArchiExpo]