Video Rflection- Don Norman: Emotional Design

In the video Emotional Design, Don Norman showed us how important emotion is in a product, people like product that can actually make them happy when using it. And it is necessary for designer to understand what beauty is about and pretty and emotions, to design products beautiful and functional.




Don started with two examples, one is the Google search thing, people may feel pleasant with the “o” down the bottom when doing search but don’t know why, he explained it as human subconscious, that is the design affect users’ emotion. The other one is the Mini Cooper, Times magazine commented on this car that it has lots of faults but buy it anyway for it is so much fun to drive. Don said when a person is happy, they are more susceptible to interruption, which makes the person think outside the box, that is when you’re happy, you are more creative. So we can see how important to design products that make people feel happy and fun.



Talking about the visceral level of design, it’s not about the function, it’s all about the outside appearance like visual, hearing or smell. As the example shown in the video, people buy the bottle of water for the beautiful bottle that can be regarded as a decoration at home.



The behavioral level of a design is important, people may be more satisfied with a product that is more than they can use it as been told, they want to control the product so they can use it the way they want. This makes me thinking about a product I bought recently- ipad, as the advertisement said, you don’t need to change yourself to fit the product, it fits you automatically. So is the example shown in the video, the global knife, it makes user feel can control it. That is exactly what we designers aiming for.



The third level of design is called reflective. If you like something, your brain has no control of what you do, the sense doesn’t control the muscle, it looks over, there is a little voice watching and saying that is good or bad. For example, an expensive watch is to impress people, it reflected to the design.