Emotional Design

by Donald A. Norman

  Manufactured design, on the other hand, often misses the mark: Objects are configured and made according to particular specifications that many users find irrelevant. Ready-made, purchased items seldom fit our precise needs, although they might be close enough to be satisfactory. Fortunately, each of us is free to buy different items and then to combine them in whatever way works best for us. Our rooms fit our lifestyles. Our possessions reflect our personalities.

  We are all designers—and have to be. Professional designers can make things that are attractive and that work well. They can create beautiful products that we fall in love with at first sight. They can create products that fulfill our needs, that are easy to understand, easy to use, and that work just the way we want them to. Pleasurable to behold, pleasurable to use. But they cannot make something personal, make something we bond to. Nobody can do that for us: we must do it for ourselves.

  Personal web sites on the internet provide a powerful tool for people to express themselves, to interact with others all across the world, and to find communities that value their contributions. Internet technologies—such as newsletters, mailing lists, and chat rooms—allow people to congregate and share ideas, opinions, and experiences. Individual web sites and web logs allow personal expression, whether for art, music, photographs, or daily musing about events. These are all-powerful personal experiences that create strong emotional feelings. Here is how one person described her web site to me:My own web site—I sometimes want to give it up because it places great demands on my time, but it represents me online in such a personal way that it is impossible to imagine life without it. It brings me friends and adventures, travel and praise, humor and surprises. It has become my interface to the world. Without it an important part of me would not exist.

  These personal web sites and web logs have become essential parts of many people’s lives. They are personal, yet shared. They are loved and hated. They bring out strong emotions. These are truly extensions of the self.

  Personal web sites, web logs, and other personal internet sites are prime examples of personal, nonprofessional design statements. Many people expend great amounts of time and energy in writing their thoughts, in collecting their favorite photographs, music, and video clips, and otherwise in presenting their personal face to the world. For many people, as with my correspondent, these personal statements represent them so intimately that it is inconceivable to imagine life without them—they have become an essential part of their self.

  We are all designers—because we must be. We live our lives, encounter success and failure, joy and sadness. We structure our own worlds to support ourselves throughout life. Some occasions, people, places, and things come to have special meanings, special emotional feelings. These are our bonds, to ourselves, to our past, and to the future. When something gives pleasure, when it becomes a part of our lives, and when the way we interact with it helps define our place in society and in the world, then we have love. Design is part of this equation, but personal interaction is the key. Love comes by being earned, when an object’s special characteristics makes it a daily part of our lives, when it deepens our satisfaction, whether because of its beauty, its behavior, or its reflective component.

  The words of William Morris provide a fitting close to the book, just as they provided a fitting opening:If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.

  Personal Reflections and Acknowledgments

  IN SOME SENSE, this book is George Mandler’s fault—surreptitiously sticking ideas in my head without my awareness. He hired me into the nascent Psychology Department of the University of California, San Diego, during the first year of the department’s existence: the University itself had not yet graduated any students. Before I knew it, I had written a book (Memory and Attention) for his editorial series; developed an introductory textbook (Human Information Processing, written with Peter Lindsay), because of the course he had Peter and me teach; reconsidered my research on memory; and then entered the field of human error and accidents—whence my interest in design (under the philosophy that most human error is, in actuality, design error).

  The Center for Human Information Processing—founded and run by Mandler—was host to the perceptual psychologist J. J. Gibson for a few summers, and these extended stays led to my many debates and continual disagreements with Gibson. These were delightful disagreements, enjoyed by both of us, disagreements of the most fruitful, scientific kind, the kind that teaches. The combination of my interest in errors and my adaptation of Gibson’s notion of affordances led to The Design of Everyday Things. (Had Gibson not died, I’m certain he would still be arguing with me, disagreeing with my interpretation of his concept, ostentatiously disconnecting his hearing aid to show that he wasn’t listening to my rebuttals, but secretly smiling and enjoying every minute.)

  George was both a cognitive psychologist and a major figure in the study of emotion. But even though I spent many hours debating and discussing topics in emotion with him, reading all his works, I never knew quite how to integrate emotion into my studies of human cognition and, especially, into my studies of the design of products. I even gave a talk at the very first conference on cognitive science, in 1979, entitled “Twelve Issues for Cognitive Science,” with emotion as number twelve. But even though I said we should study it, I didn’t myself know how to go about doing it. My argument was convincing to at least one person in the audience: Andrew Ortony, now a professor at Northwestern University, tells me that he switched his area of research to emotion as a result of that talk.

  In 1993, I left academia to join industry—serving as vice president at Apple Computer and then as an executive in other high-technology companies, including Hewlett Packard and an online, educational startup. In 1998, my colleague Jakob Nielsen and I established a consulting firm, the Nielsen Norman group, which has exposed me to a wide variety of products in several different industries. Eventually, though, academics drew me back, this time to the computer science department at Northwestern University. I now spend half time at the university, the other half with the Nielsen Norman group.

  At Northwestern University, Andrew Ortony reawakened my dormant interest in emotion. In the decade that I was away from academia, much progress had been made in understanding the neuroscience and psychology of emotion. Moreover, while in industry, helping bring out a wide variety of products, from computers to appliances to web sites, I became sensitive to the powerful emotional impact that designs can produce. People were often far less interested in how well something worked, or even in what it did, than in how it looked and how it made them feel.

  Together with William Revelle, a personality theorist in the department of psychology, Ortony and I decided to re-examine the literature on affect, behavior, and cognition to try to understand this emotional attraction. As our work progressed, it became clear that emotion and affect should not be separated from cognition—nor those from behavior, motivation, and personality; all are essential to effective functioning in the world. Our work forms the theoretical background for this book.

  At roughly the same period, Bill Gross of Idealab! started a new company—Evolution Robotics—to create robots for the home. He asked me to join their advisory board; before long, I was deeply engrossed in the science of robots. Robots, I soon determined, need to have emotions to survive; indeed, emotions are essential for all autonomous creatures, humans or machine. To my pleasant surprise, I discovered that a research paper I had written in 1986 with the neuropsychologist Tim Shallice, on “will” as a control system, was being used in robotics. Aha! I began to see how it all fit together.

  As these separate approaches coalesced, applications dropped out naturally. Our scientific explorations led us to propose that effective processing is best analyzed at three different levels. This insight clarified many issues. It soon became clear that many of the arguments about the role of emotion, beauty,
and fun versus marketing concerns, advertising claims, and the positioning of products—along with the difficulties of making a product usable and functional—were often debates across the different levels of processing. All these issues are important, but all have different levels of influence, with different time courses, and at different places in the cycle of purchase and use.

  My goal in writing this book is to put these apparently conflicting themes into one coherent framework based upon the three-level theory of affect, behavior, and cognition. With this framework I aim to provide a deeper understanding of the design process and the emotional impact of products.

  So, thank you, George; thank you, Andrew; thank you, Bill.

  THIS BOOK, like all my works, owes its existence to many other people. It started with the ever encouraging prods of both my patient agent, Sandy Dijkstra, and my business partner, Jakob Nielsen. No, not quite nagging, but continual reminders and encouragement. I’m always writing, always jotting things down, so out of these notes I created a manuscript entitled “The Future of Everyday Things.” But when I tried teaching this material to students at Northwestern University, I discovered it lacked cohesion: the framework that tied the ideas together came from the new work on emotion that I was doing with Andrew Ortony and Bill Revelle, and this was not part of the book.

  Ortony, Revelle, and I were developing a theory of emotion, and as we made progress, I realized that the approach could be applied to the field of design. Moreover, the work finally enabled me to resolve the apparent contradictions between my professional interest in making things usable and my personal appreciation of aesthetics. So I discarded that first book manuscript and started anew, this time using the theoretical work on emotion as a framework. Once again, I tried teaching the material, this time with far better success. My students in that first class, and then the ones who tried out the manuscript of this book, were all most helpful in transforming unrelated notes into coherent manuscript.

  Along the way, my professional colleagues have provided considerable advice and resources. Danny Bobrow, my long-term colleague, with intelligent pokes, prods, and irritating questions where he would find the flaws in any argument I attempted. Jonathan Grudin, with a continuous flow of email, oftentimes from dawn to dusk, with comments, papers, and critiques. Patrick Whitney, head of the Institute of Design in Chicago, who invited me to serve on his board and provided both insightful comments and access to the industrial design community. Many of the faculty of the Institute of Design have been most helpful: Chris Conley, John Heskett, Mark Rettig, and Kei Sato. Nirmal Sethia, from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, has been a continual source of contacts and information: Nirmal seems to know everyone in the field of industrial design and has made sure I was up-to-date.

  THE POWERFUL team of interaction designers Shelley Evenson and John Rheinfrank always provide great insights (and John is a great chef). I thank Paul Bradley, David Kelly, and Craig Sampson of IDEO and Walter Herbst and John Hartman from Herbst LaZar Bell.

  Cynthia Breazeal and Roz Picard from the MIT Media Laboratory provided numerous useful interactions, including visits to their laboratories, which contributed considerably to chapters 6 and 7. Rodney Brooks, head of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT and a roboticist, was also a great source of information. Marvin Minsky, as always, provided much inspiration, especially with the manuscript of his forthcoming book, The Emotion Machine.

  I tested many of my ideas on the several bulletin boards of the CHI community (the international society for Computer-Human Interaction), and many respondents have been most helpful. The list of correspondents is huge—hundreds—but I am especially indebted to my fruitful conversations with and suggestions from Joshua Barr, Gilbert Cockton, Marc Hassenzahl, Challis Hodge, William Hudson, Kristiina Karvonen, Jonas Löwgren, Hugh McLoone, George Olsen, Kees Overbeeke, Etienne Pelaprat, Gerard Torenvliet, and Christina Wodtke. I thank Kara Pernice Coyne, Susan Farrell, Shuli Gilutz, Luice Hwang, Jakob Nielsen, and Amy Stover of the Nielsen Norman group for their lively discussions.

  Jim Stewart from Microsoft’s XBOX division provided discussions of the game industry and the XBOX poster for my walls (“Go outside. Get some air. Watch a sunset. Boy, does that get old fast.”).

  The book slowly transformed from eighteen disorganized chapters into the present seven chapters, plus prologue and epilogue, through two massive rewrites, guided by Jo Ann Miller, my editor at Basic Books. She worked me hard—fortunately for you. Thanks, Jo Ann. And thanks to Randall Pink for diligently gathering final photographs and permissions.

  Although I have left out many who helped during the long gestation period for this book, my thanks to all, named and unnamed, including all my students at both Northwestern University and the Institute of Design who helped me clarify my thoughts through the various revisions.

  Don Norman Northbrook, Illinois

  Notes

  Prologue: Three Teapots

  3 “If you want a golden rule” (Morris, 1882. Quotation is from Chapter 3, “The Beauty of Life,” originally delivered before the Birmingham Society of Arts and School of Design, February 19, 1880.)

  6–7 “no new vehicle in recent memory has provoked more smiles” (Swan, 2002)

  7 “It starts out with slight annoyance” (Hughes-Morgan, 2002)

  12 “The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio studied people” (Damasio, 1994)

  13 Parts of this chapter were published in Interactions, a publication of The Association for Computing Machines (Norman, 2002b)

  Chapter One: Attractive Things Work Better

  17 “two Japanese researchers, Masaaki Kurosu and Kaori Kashimura” (Kurosu & Kashimura, 1995)

  17–18 “Japanese culture is known for its aesthetic tradition” (Tractinsky, 1997)

  18 “So Tractinsky redid the experiment” (Tractinsky, 1997; Tractinsky, Katz, & Ikar, 2000)

  18 “It requires a somewhat mystical theory” (Read, 1953, p. 61)

  19 “The psychologist Alice Isen and her colleagues” (Ashby, Isen, & Turken, 1999; Isen, 1993)

  21 “My studies of emotion, conducted with my colleagues” (Ortony, Norman, & Revelle, 2004)

  31 “two words in the mythical language Elvish.” Tolkien’s books are, of course, well known (Tolkien, 1954a, b, c, 1956). This particular experiment was done in my classroom by Dan Halstead and Gitte Waldman (in 2002). They described the sound symbolism of Tolkien and, in a class demonstration, showed that people who had never heard Elvish could still reliably determine the meaning of its words.

  32 “a sound symbolism governs the development” (Hinton, Nichols, & Ohala, 1994)

  Chapter Two: The Multiple Faces of Emotion and Design

  41 “almost 20,000 in the United States alone.” Magazine Publishers of America, figures for the year 2001.

  http://www.magazine.org/consumer_marketing/index.html

  46 “kitsch.” The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Copyright © 1999, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/

  46 “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” (Berra & Horton, 1989)

  47 The Meaning of Things (Csikszentmihalyi & Rochberg-Halton, 1981)

  48 “They are the first two chairs me and my husband bought.” (Csikszentmihalyi & Rochberg-Halton, 1981, p. 60)

  48 “Household objects,” (Csikszentmihalyi & Rochberg-Halton, 1981, p. 187)

  49 “when I walked through the exhibits on display at the San Francisco Airport.” The San Francisco Airport Museums: http://www.sfoarts.org/.

  49 “The marvel of souvenir buildings” Text from the exhibit (Smookler, 2002)

  52 “With every photo there is a story” (Cowen, 2002)

  53 “Frohlich describes the possibilities this way” (Cowen, 2002)

  54 “But put Asians in an individualistic situation” (Kitayama, 2002)

  55 “the Heathkit Company.” The company has stopped making kits, although it still
makes electronic learning materials. See the history at http://www.heathkit-museum.com/history.shtml.

  55 “As the market researchers Bonnie Goebert and Herma Rosenthal put it” (Goebert & Rosenthal, 2001. The quotations are from Chapter 1: Listening 101, the value of focus groups.)

  57 “Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” (Pirsig, 1974)

  57 “The American Heritage Dictionary defines fashion . . .” The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

  60 “Emotional branding is about building relationships.” Sergio Zyman, Former Chief Marketing Office of Coca-Cola. In the foreword to Emotional Branding (Gobé, 2001).

  60 “Emotional branding is based on that unique trust that is established with an audience.” (Gobé, 2001. From the preface, page ix.)

  Chapter Three: Three Levels of Design: Visceral, Behavioral, and Reflective

  63 “I remember deciding to buy Apollinaris.” Email from Hugues Belanger, in response to my query. May 6, 2002. To see the bottle, Belanger said: For a picture of the bottle, check out http://www.apollinaris.de/english/index.html (mouse over “Products” and click on “Apollinaris Classic”).

  64 “Walk down a grocery aisle.” From the web site of “The Bottled Water Web”: http://www.bottledwaterweb.com/indus.html.