Saturday, September 29, 2012

Assignment #4 - Contrasting the perspectives of "Emotional Design" to "Design of Everyday Things"



If the assignment was to contrast the first chapter of “Emotional Design” and “The Design of Everyday Things” in general, then I would have a whole lot to say, such as DOET actually backs up its ideas with good examples and DOET actually talks about how its ideas actually affect design, but since the assignment is to focus on the two’s perspectives, I will try to limit my comparisons to the two views of the books.

Design of Everyday Things is very practical. It focuses on how the design of everyday things can help/hurt us when we are trying to figure out how to use them. The design should promote understanding through constraints, feedback, affordance, etc. Emotional Design focuses much more on the aesthetics of the design. He discusses how the aesthetics can affect how we feel and therefore how we think when using the object.

While the two books are very different, I do not see how they necessarily opposites of each other. I feel like these two different ideas can coexist peacefully in a world where all created objects can be functional, easily used, and affect our emotions the proper way. Nowhere in the first book did he say that the way the object looked had to be sacrificed in order for his principles to be used. He did give some examples where the design was difficult to use because they sacrificed usability for aesthetics, but he also mentions in the other book that it can be bad to go the exact opposite route too.  He mentions in Chapter 6 of DOET that selective attention is bad in any form. In my opinion, this is just an additional factor for designers. They must strive to handle everything Norman talked about in the first book, and in addition, consider how the design affects the emotional state of the user.

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