1.4 Facilitating Positive Emotional Experiences with Products

In a lifestyle-design approach, a key factor in the design process includes considering the kind of positive interactions we could have with products and services that we own or use. A lifestyle-design approach focuses on how to immediately trigger visceral appeal through pleasurable emotional interactions when we first engage with a product. Three different product roles that contribute to creating positive emotional product experiences, derived from Desmet (2018), can be categorized as:

1. A pleasurable object is something that stimulates pleasant emotional responses. The product may have features that connect to personal or cultural meanings through its look and feel, sound, smell, or even taste. For example, the sounds of a lawnmower, wind chimes, or the ice cream truck bell may remind you of pleasant summers.
2. An instrument is an object that makes you feel good about completing a task. For example, you may feel pleasure as a result of stapling a large pile of notes with a stapler that was strong enough for the job. Your sense of satisfaction comes from using the right instrument for the task. You may also feel a pleasurable emotion of success when cutting high branches from a tree with a long-handled set of trimming shears rather than balancing on a ladder with a pair of short-handled garden shears.
3. An enabler is a product that simply brings you joy or delight while you are using it. For example, you could be delighted with your bicycle while enjoying cycling along a beautiful riverside path or loving how your sneakers provide cushioning for the uneven terrain of the hilly path you are running on.

THREE PRODUCT ROLES

In the field of design for emotion, psychological design researchers have developed tools to help designers identify the types of experiences, interactions, contexts of use, and features that contribute to a positive interaction with the designed object (Yoon et al, 2020). They believe that positive emotions experienced while interacting with a product may contribute to an improved sense of well-being over time. For example, over time you might experience positive emotions because you are contributing to the well-being of the planet as you use eco-friendly storage containers.