Design for Emotion

Creative professionals who design consumer products, entertainment, software, websites, marketing, and communications are beginning to appreciate the importance of evoking emotions and personality to capture viewers' attention and create satisfying experiences. Design for Emotion addresses the basic questions around designing emotional experiences; why, what, when, where and how do we design for emotion? With extensive real-world examples to help illustrate how emotion and personality are communicated through design, Design for Emotion isn't just another book on design theory - it's an imminently practical guide to applying and eliciting emotion in design.

Design for Emotion:

• explains the relationship between emotions and product personalities
• details the most important dimensions of a product's personality
• examines models for understanding users' relationships with products
• explores how to intentionally design product personalities
• provides extensive examples from the worlds of product, web and application design
• includes a simple and effective model for creating more emotional designs

The book features interviews with Stephen P. Anderson, Aarron Walter, Marco van Hout, Patrick W. Jordan and Trish Miner, and case studies from Moni Wolf, Matt Pattison, Shayal Chhibber, Chris Fryer and Damian Smith. Harness the power of emotional design to enhance products, websites and applications while improving user experience and increasing customer satisfaction. Design for Emotion will help you do a better job of communicating the emotions and personality that fit your client's message and brand values.

About the Authors

Trevor has spent the last nine years understanding how emotion affects design and how design affects emotion. He's been working in design and visual communications since 1994, and holds a Master of Environmental Design in Industrial Design from the University of Calgary, and a B.F.A. in Graphic Design. Formerly the first employee at nForm User Experience, Trevor helped build the company into a leading Canadian user experience firm.

He is the founder and principal of Affective Design Inc., a trusted user experience consultancy focused on emotional design. Trevor has created information architecture, performed interaction design and conducted user research & usability evaluations for clients like the City of Edmonton, the Edmonton Transit System, Comcast, Ancestry.com, DDB Canada and the Government of Alberta.

Trevor is the author and editor of affectivedesign.org, a popular blog on the intersection of design and emotion that is used by corporations and institutions all over the world to help learn about emotional and affective design. He contributed to Deconstructing Product Design by William Lidwell and Gerry Manacsa, and has written articles for Boxes and Arrows, a noted industry web magazine.

Trevor has given presentations on the topic of designing for emotion at conferences in Canada, the United States and Sweden. He is a member of the Information Architecture Institute, Design & Emotion Society and the Industrial Designers of America.

Edie has made a career of evoking emotion through design. For more than 20 years, she has worked with product teams, innovation groups, and business leadership to develop an understanding of the physical, cognitive and emotional interactions between people and products that drive product success.

Edie's emotional design and research innovations have been recognized with more than 40 US patents. Her design work is included in the Permanent Collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Chicago Athenaeum. She was also featured in "Fast Forward: Design in the Pacific Northwest" at the Tacoma Art Museum.

To begin her 16 years at Microsoft, Edie led a team researching people's physical, cognitive and emotional interactions with products for the Microsoft Hardware and Strategic Business divisions. She has held numerous research and design manager positions in Windows, including Windows Mobile and Tailored Products, the Windows Hardware Innovation Group, and the Windows Hardware and Emerging Markets Group. In each, Edie has worked with many different types of designers (industrial designers, interaction designers & visual designers), market and user researchers, hardware and software architects, and business development to spur innovation in the PC industry. During her time with Windows Core Operating System Division (COSD), she developed an understanding of the premium mobile consumer market for the Platform and Core Innovation team. Her last posting saw her leading a diverse team of 27 designers, researchers, and writers as the Principal User Experience Manager for the Mac Business Unit (MacBU) at Microsoft.

Edie is trained in occupational ergonomics, product design, and design research. She is a CPE (Certified Professional Ergonomist), and holds a Master of Environmental Design in Industrial Design and a Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) in Psychology from the University of Calgary, where she has been an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Environmental Design.

Edie is past president of the Office Ergonomics Research Committee, past program chair of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Consumer Product Technical Group, and past vice chair of the Human Factors Special Interest Section of the Industrial Design Society of America.