Emotionally durable design

Emotional responses make up the very foundations of individuality; they are what distinguish us from others. Emotions are not isolated, they are different for everyone. They are compounded phenomena involving expressive, behavioural, experiential and physiological facets. I have written down my best findings from the book Emotionally Durable Design by Jonathan Chapman.

Donald Norman (behavioural scientist) says; design, and the way we interact with it consists of 3 parts:

• Visceral, the instinctive emotions we have with appearances of the design.

• Behavioural, has to do with the pleasure and effectiveness of use.

• Reflective, considers the rationalization and intellectualization of a product; can I tell a story about it? Does it appeal to myself image, to my pride?

Simply put, when the products we own reflect desirable and up-to-date reflections of our existence, they get to stay, while products that don’t, do not. These last named products create waste. Waste, is the symptom of expired empathy, a kind of failed relationship that leads to the dumping of one by the other.
As a creative industry, it is vital that we break away from the physical and begin to understand more about the sustainability of empathy, meaning, desire and other metaphysical factors that influence the duration of product life – nurturing a new and enlightened wave of design built on a deeper understanding of how consumers create and sustain attachments within this overabundant material world.

Three guidelines on Emotional Durable Design are;

1. Let it evolve, change, grow with the user
2. Building up layers of narrative by reflecting traces of the user’s invested care and attention. Let the user discover new things every time again throughout the slow passing of time, and it will give his attention the whole time to the object.
3. Leaving space for the user
Narrative experiences must not be over-programmed; spontaneous occurrences create the magic between the subject and the object.
Empathy and intimacy between user and object activate experiences and expands consciousness. When narrative experiences are communicable in this way, the objects, which deliver them, adopt even greater significance; they share intimate narratives with the user, which can then be shared further within the user’s social group.

Many practitioners are beginning to believe that there should be no such thing as sustainable design, claiming that it is wrong to departmentalize environmentally aware design practice, as it should simply be integrated within conventional design practice without ceremony.
Design for disassembly, design for recycling, and the specification of recyclable and biodegradable materials, are already in place and have been so for a number of years – most of which attempt to address the after-effects of our wasteful production and consumption cycles. Despite the apparent future-conscious ethos of these countermeasures, they attend to symptoms rather than causes.

We must develop an understanding of the actual drivers that underpin our wasteful consumption crisis if anything like an ecologically sustainable design culture is to develop.

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Summarized from the book: Emotionally Durable Design, Jonathan Chapman, 2005