1.1 Introduction

Most of us have emotional reactions to the products we use every day; we love some, we hate some, and we prefer some over others. In fact, it is the design of product features that enhances those emotional experiences. Some designed features add cute and lovable qualities to children’s toys, hygienic and trustworthy characteristics to medical equipment, and countless other emotional messages that influence our perception of the products we use. Experts tell us that our relationship with the world is essentially affective, which means that all our interactions imply and involve emotions, whether interactions are with the social or the material world (Desmet, 2009). For example, in many cultures, both cars and phones are products that we interact with daily and are designed to play on our emotional attachment and sense of design appeal. These emotionally charged aesthetic elements contribute to why we love certain objects or find some more intuitive to use than others.

Some of us may have different interpretations of the emotional messages that designers embed into products based on subjective factors in our experiences. These could include: cultural references, emotional connections, familiar contexts of use, favoured design elements, metaphors, past experiences with a similar product, psychological interpretations, and sensory attributes. In order for designers to develop artefacts that are perceived as beautiful and functional, it helps to have insights into a wide range of rituals, emotions, memories, and meanings that involve product interactions. These contribute to understanding how we interact with products in different contexts and how that influences product attachment.

Many everyday products expose us to suggestive and symbolic messages because of the designer’s choices of features such as surface treatments, colour combinations, and product shapes or forms. Design features may symbolically communicate subtle messages that are encoded within products, whether intentional or not, that affect our relationships with those products. This chapter discusses key concepts related to design, emotion, meaning, and ritual that are fundamental for designers to understand, beginning with the theory behind our emotional interactions with products.

Further, this chapter introduces principles that designers can draw from to enhance emotional experiences with products. You will learn:

• How designers and marketers interpret and classify people’s behaviours towards products.
• The kinds of product roles that give rise to emotional responses.
• The value of long-term emotional attachment to products and how designers can support this.
• How products enhance daily routines and rituals.
• A range of multisensory emotional design approaches and elements for designing emotionally influenced product experiences.
• How to use a product semantics approach to apply emotional meaning to product design features.