Hi, my name is Marco. Follow me @demadera

I started this website in 2003, when little was written about the topic of emotional design. Since then, a lot has changed. I have given numerous workshops and presentations teaching designers, marketeers, managers and researchers about how to design with an emotional intent. Furthermore, the Design & Emotion Society of which I am one of the board members, has grown significantly and has proven that this is a field that is coming of age, with its bi-annual conferences where the quality and amount of contributions is increasingly growing. You will also find more and more books that address design for emotion, with ‘Emotional Design’ by Donald Norman as perhaps the best known title.

I invite you to become a member of the Design & Emotion Society and keep on contributing to this field.

I would also love to be in touch with you if you have any ideas for this website or would like to contact me about my work or services:

My work

I believe that consumers nowadays are looking for rich sensorial, emotional and meaningful experiences, not merely for ‘just’ a product or service. It is up to the companies to challenge their designers, R&D department and marketers to (positively) influence the experiential impact of their products and services.

I help companies to step up to this challenge, by:

• Helping them gain consumer insight, with scientifically validated tools and methods to measure consumer emotions
• Showing how their products and services evoke emotions and how they can tackle the challenge to design with an emotional intent
• Teaching them to focus on meaning, not market
• Imagining future meanings first, not features nor possibilities

You can read more about my work, also as a professional speaker and abstract painter on my personal website: www.marcovanhout.nl

SusaGroup

I am co-founder and creative director of SusaGroup. SusaGroup is a strategic design consultancy with a particular focus on emotion as the key to create better, more enjoyable products and services and meaningful experiences in the end. SusaGroup combines scientific competences with market insights in the development and application of innovative, valid, and relevant tools to measure emotions. SusaGroup advises and trains several large corporations and FMCG’s in  improving their products and services based on insights in the emotions of their customers. Clients included companies such as Unilever, Mars, Microsoft, BIC, Toyota and Philips.

The Design & Emotion Society

I am also a board member of the International Design for Emotion Society, which raises issues and facilitates dialogue among practitioners, researchers and industry in order to integrate salient themes of emotional experience into the design profession.

Key words

emotional design, experience driven design, user experience, consumer psychology, innovation and future meanings and trends