Exploiting emotions for successful product design

Abstract

The ever-increasing competitiveness in product design is resulting in good product functionality and usability no longer being sufficiently effective differentiators in the market place. As a result stakeholder’s attention is shifting to other product attributes such as the pleasurable emotions experienced during interaction. Designing for product-emotions is a relatively new emerging field in product design which is however being accredited increasing importance because of its new product development and marketing potential. This research paper reports the research being conducted at the Concurrent Engineering Research Unit (CERU) in the Department of Manufacturing Engineering (DME) at the University of Malta (UOM) via a research project entitled Demo. This research contributes to this field with the development of a phenomena model of product emotion elicitation that will lead to the future development of the required knowledge to provide an envisaged computational Design for Emotion (DFe) support for designers.