Don Norman: Emotional Design (Task 1a)

This post is about the first Video Blog task of Emotional Design by Don Norman. During his speech, Norman mentions about the new view of what the beauty and the emotions are. He says that the design, (or could be anything) should be that people can be positive by touching and feeling those.

He had an impression to the Japanese knife in terms of its shape (saying "beautiful"), balance (feels good) and function (excellent sharpness).
His passion is all towards the fun. For example, he defines brain-storming as the method of making us happy. Thus when the problem in our head is solved, that is the moment we feel happy. That should be emotional satisfaction of us. In addition, he explained about such satisfaction by raising the example of a car up. He seems pretty happy about the well-designed appearance of inside the car. All the components are round and organized. Therefore, how those are placed is also the key point of feeling happy, I guess.

In our case as designer, we can achieve that people (clients) feel happy about our design by our emotionally successful ideas. We can feel happy as well because we figure the solution about the best idea out.

Therefore, it is important for us to be creative not only about how functional, or any physical excellence our designs are, but also about how emotionally we can communicate with people so that they can feel good to use it. That is the wonderful part of the design.

In my thought, good design should come with a good appearance first, however if we have only that point, it is never enough to achieve the emotional satisfaction. We need everything. Those are like function, balance, etc.. So I can say that Norman points the quite important issue out. All I need to do first is maybe having fun. This is because if I did not design with fun, enjoyment or something similar, my products will surely not be interesting in terms of not satisfying you.

In order to enjoy my design, I think I need the vital spec with me such as the general skills about design. So I must be fine with technical drawings, marker sketching, model making etc.. And then I can start enjoying my design. Therefore, I feel the time is never enough to build up myself. Design is fun and I want to enjoy more. I will never forget this “emotion”.