Emotional Design (Book Review)
For anyone interested in design, the work of Donald A. Norman should be on your must-read list. He is a cognitive scientist and a co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group along with Jakob Nielsen. With Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things Norman takes a step further from his earlier work in The Design of Everday Things to investigate a three level hierarchy to the way our brains process – the visceral, behavioural and reflective.
The visceral level of processing is the instinctive part of our brain which reacts to threat and makes judgements based on primal level biological responses. Visceral design equates to appearance. Designing for the visceral level is to design a sexy sports car or a theme park ride that scares the living daylights out of people. At the next level of processing is the behavioural layer which involves the pleasure of using something – the usability, functionality, efficiency, or ergonomic comfort of a design. And at the highest level of processing in our brain operates the reflective level which involves the way a design affects our self-image (the iPhone), the associated memories (a photo album or a personal gift from a close friend), or the level of satisfaction that is associated with an object. For example, tacky kitsch memorabilia of our holiday to Paris. Or the pride of having overcome our visceral fear on the theme park ride.
Emotional Design asks why we love or hate everyday things? And, given the three levels of processing within our brain, how do we design objects which meet our design objectives. Because all things aren’t equal in the world of objects. 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.
Norman puts forward an enjoyable read which opened my eyes to some extent about the different ways that people engage with a design. There’s the aesthetic beauty (or ugliness), the object’s functionality, and it’s perceived levels of satisfaction. Design, therefore, is a multi-dimensional approach to solving problems.
In his epilogue he states that everyone is a designer, a statement Bill Buxton calls him out on publicly. Bill says we’re no more a mathemetician because we count our change coming out of a grocery store. Bill, after all, talks about Design with a capital D. In that sense, we’re not all trained designers with a decade of focused learning. But I get what Norman is saying, too. Something a little different. Norman is suggesting that we model our environment to meet our individual needs and in that sense we make design decisons every day about colour and space and context. It’s not the same as what Bill would consider trained Design.
I haven’t given away anything about this book beyond the barest concepts. Emotional Design is a powerful read and belongs in your professional library.
