Via Brandchannel:

Coca-Cola has long made happiness part of its brand DNA. Now extending that joy into social, the iconic brand‘s Happy Places photo app and social network is encouraging people to share their happy moments with a new photo-sharing social network, Happy Places, and a free mobile app to enable it. The launch comes as Twitter is rumored to be ready to launch a photo filter, a move that Instagram’s CEO says doesn’t scare him.

While the website’s domain name was registered in June it’s not yet activated, although its free iOS app was released November 1st, described as: “that place where you can upload photos of your happy moments, share them, and remember them any time you want. Take a picture or pick one from your albums, add it to your profile, and share that moment of happiness with your followers in Happy Places, or your friends in Facebook or Twitter.”

Users can view and comment on other’s pictures and follow hashtags like #music, #joy and #girlfriends to keep up-to-date with new uploads that fit with these “moments.” A earlier version of the app was released for Android and BlackBerry devices.

While it likely won’t make inroads into the Instagram, Flickr and Facebook photo app space, AppSide notes that “Coke’s mighty marketing muscle and impressive global reach means that it has the ability to reach out to whole new audiences that most photo-sharing services could never even dream of.”

INTRO: What happens when designers shift their focus from satisfying consumer desires, to facilitating new social possibilities? In recent design history, different labels have popped up to describe design research practices that engage with social issues. These include participatory design, service design, transformative design, metadesign and social design. This article explores the notion of socially responsive design, a term coined by design researchers Adam Thorpe and Lorraine Gamman based in the Design Against Crime Research Centre, London, UK. It describes design that makes a social impact, is driven by social issues and delivers social change. Design researchers Hannah Jones and Anette Lundebye attempt to ‘connect the dots’ between a range of socially responsive design approaches taking place in the UK, Netherlands and Norway. They set out to interview six design experts from their network to discover how they define socially responsive design, what it feels like to be involved in this practice; and how it’s likely to impact on design in the future.

I was interviewed by Hannah and Anette, an excerpt of my answers that made it to the final article:

CD: What is Socially Responsive Design? We kicked off our interviews by asking our different design researchers, educators and practitioners if they consider themselves as socially responsive designers and how they understand this term.

MvH: I see an increasing interest in socially responsive design within the context of experience-driven design. In fact, I believe they are interdependent and they share the concept of emotion. Emotions are the drivers behind (social) behaviour as well as behind the experiences we the dots #545socially responsive designhave in general. Something that is becoming more important in experience design is the impact of products on people’s general health, well-being and happiness. In the past decade or so, the Internet and developments in mobile technology have completely changed our perspectives of the world and our social environment. Take the recent events in the Middle East for example. It made us feel closer to the people actually fighting for change far, far away and made us feel a shared responsibility.

CD: Can you give us a practical example of socially responsive design?Each of our experts were asked to come up with examples of socially responsive design from their own practice or inspiring examples from the work of others.

MvH: An example that immediately comes to my mind is a prototype concept for an app that we created some years ago called ‘Snapje’. This app engages both parents and children with autism. The Snapje concept has been developed to enable children to get skills in emotion recognition in relation to the context. A parent can take photos of situations that have an emotional meaning. Photos can be taken of familiar people, but also from the child itself. On the one hand it is very useful to learn from emotions of others in relation to the context. On the other hand, it is useful to learn the relation between the context and an emotion through own experiences of the emotion. (www.emotiondiary.com/snapje/)

CD: What does it feel like to participate in socially responsive design? We wanted to understand from our interviewees how being involved in socially responsive design is different to traditional design in terms of the emotional feedback from the process.

MvH: Engaging people, making things more pleasurable is one thing, making a change in people’s social context, wellbeing and even happiness is a completely different story and obviously rewarding. I am extra proud that my fellow board member (of the Design & Emotion Society, ed.) Pieter Desmet has initiated the Delft Institute of Positive Design, which aims to stimulate the development of knowledge that supports designers in their attempts to design for happiness, for human flourishing. (http://studiolab.ide.tudelft.nl/diopd/)

CD: Can you give us a scenario for socially responsive design in 2020? What kind of futures do our interviews predict for this approach to design?

MvH: I like the description on the website of the Delft Institute of Positive Design: “Since the industrial revolution, all of our society – our workplaces, homes, transportation, and communication, have increasingly become infused with design… Research has shown that our dishwashers, computers, radios, cars, and other products we are surrounded with, do not make us particularly happy.”

People are increasingly looking for products and services that fulfil life goals that go beyond material wealth and are more valuable for social cohesion, health and general well-being. I believe in the future a lot of designers will want to be part of a group of change-makers. We won’t be designing anymore for the sake of designing, we will only be designing for a purpose, such as meeting real needs. Between now and 2020, it is design’s time to shine. I think socially responsive design and related approaches will have to be leading in this movement. Luckily, I see lots of signals that illustrate exactly this.

Originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, Bernardo has been working over the last 12 years within the fragrance industry, developing a unique and fresh approach to fragrance design. He combines a strong strategic vision with innovative thinking, endless curiosity, a keen eye for market trends, and a high level of execution. For him, his work is integrated into everything he does. He loves to travel and considers himself an explorer always looking for new ideas, ways of thinking and inspiration.

Bernardo has worked across a wide spectrum of projects with varied priorities; from developing innovative fragrance delivery systems for the laundry category, to “time travelling” for the olfactive future in toilet care products, and most recently partnering with artists and designers to enrich sensorial experiences by adding the dimension of scent.

Yesterday I caught up with Bernardo at the beautiful office of IFF in Hilversum, The Netherlands. He showed me around, I had a sniff at the wonderful D&E2012 fragrance he developed especially for the conference with this team, and he showed the vast library of IFF developed products. An intense experience for the senses. I also took the opportunity to ask Bernardo how he interprets ‘design for emotion’, what it means in his field of work and how he goes ‘out of control’.

To me ‘design for emotion’ stands for…

“Out of Control”

IFF

IFF is a leading global creator of flavours and fragrances used in a wide variety of consumer products. Millions of consumers around the world enjoy these products on a daily basis without ever knowing that they are a key component to the unique scent and taste experiences people love. For more information about the company, visit the website at www.iff.com

The book provides a very nice overview of the theory, psychology and concepts behind ‘design for emotion’. I highly recommend it, especially for professionals that haven’t studied this topic too much yet. The book offers a rich amount of background information and examples that will help you to better understand the concept of emotional design. Furthermore Van Gorp & Adams illustrate their framework A.C.T. to put ‘emotional design’ into practice.

I am also very happy to have contributed to the book with an interview on the LEMtool.

Official announcement by Trevor on his website Affective Design:

After seven years of research and almost one and a half years of writing, I’m very pleased to announce that the book I’ve co-authored with Microsoft’s Edie Adams on designing for emotion and personality is available on Amazon.

Drawing on our combined experience of over 30 years in graphic, interactive and industrial design, human factors, and product management, Design for Emotion explores the what, when, where, why and how of designing emotion and personality. We define and model emotion and personality in a way that relates directly to design practice.

To help illustrate how emotion and personality can be applied across different design disciplines, marketing and communications, we’ve also included practical case studies and interviews with some of the brightest minds utilizing emotion in design, including:

Interviews

• Stephen P. Anderson – author of Seductive Interaction Design
• Aarron Walter – head of UX for Mailchimp, author of Designing for Emotion
• Patrick Jordan – author of Designing Pleasurable Products
• Marco van Hout – co-founder and creative director, SusaGroup, developers of the LEMtool
• Trish Miner – co-creator of the Microsoft Desirability Toolkit

Case Studies

• Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Reference Designs – by Moni Wolf
• PICO™  (Negative Pressure Wound Therapy) - by Matt Pattison, Shayal Chhibber, Damian Smith and Chris Fryer

For more information about the book, head on over to the new Design for Emotion site, or buy the book on Amazon.com

LEMtool makes it possible to uncover the emotional impact of a design. You can test sketches, mock-ups, early designs, websites or any other image. In other words: testing at any stage in the design process is possible. With LEMtool it is even possible to evaluate live websites or working prototypes on a password protected location.

Also, have a look at the LEMtool features. Below, I will describe more extensively what science is behind the development of LEMtool.

The science behind LEMtool

Optimizing usability is the basis for every great user experience. Apart from the actual usability of a website, there is also the usability as perceived by the user. Several studies indicate a strong relation between perceived usability and the visual appeal of a website (“attractive things appear to work better”). This seems to suggest that the main purpose of visual design in any interface, is a functional one, aimed at improving usability.

Emotion is therefore a vital additional dimension to current usability studies.

Indeed, efficient and effective communication with the user through the appropriate visual design of an interface, is a goal most designers seek to accomplish. Nonetheless, visual appeal is not purely perceived as functional.

Research has indicated that there are attributes in an interface that do not necessarily relate to usability, but to the pleasure that a high visual appeal interface might evoke in its users.

What links visual appeal to affect (and emotion) is that objects are not only categorized based on perceived features of the object, but can also be emotionally categorized. This means that objects that evoke similar emotions can be categorized based on the similarity of these emotions.

Emotion is therefore a vital additional dimension to current usability studies.

Web relevant emotions

Identifying specific emotions that are most relevant in web- and media experiences helped build a more relevant basis for the LEMtool.

In an experiment using free-response tasks for commenting on website, participants consistently reported most on three areas, namely; aesthetics (visual stimuli pleasuring or offending the senses), usability (perception of effectiveness and efficiency of an interface based on goals and expectations), and liking (an overall judgment of the user’s interactive experiences). Especially the areas of aesthetics and usability are central to the evaluation of interfaces in general.

In the table on the right, you see the final eight emotions and to which area they relate.

Why work with a cartoon character?

The LEMtool has been developed to depict emotions in the clearest, most recognizable way. In order to achieve this, LEM – a cartoon character, has been developed that shows eight caricatured expressions of emotions3. Facial caricaturing (reduction of facial information redundant to the expression and exaggeration of the essential components) has been found to enhance the recognizability of emotions.

Why not add the words to explain the expression?

We deliberately do not explain which emotions are expressed by the character. This ‘non-verbal approach’ actually adds reliability to the tests. Often, people are feeling similar emotions, but refer to it with different words. With our scientifically validated cartoon characters you surpass the verbal word-significance discussion.
A great benefit of this approach is that it can be used cross-culturally: Between cultures, there are tons of small differences between words that are used to express emotions.

We might feel the same emotion, but call it differently

- How the LEMtool avoids the verbal word-significance discussion

Our research shows that even though different people use different words to express a specific emotion, they choose the same cartoon character expression because it best represents their felt emotion. This illustrates that these people are actually feeling the same, but merely call it differently.

Self-report

Recent technological advances have made it possible to measure people’s ‘emotions’. What these advancing approaches have in common is a focus on behavior (facial expression and bodily gestures) or physiological metrics (heart rate, skin conductance, EMG, pupil dialation). Even though the progress in technology helps improve the used instruments, there are some major limitations, especially in measuring web and media emotions.

• Physiological approaches mainly measure ‘affective arousal’ and do not provide insight in whether it is positive or negative, let alone which specific emotion is felt. To know if a user feels boredome or desire, you will have to ask them. LEMtool is perfect for that.
• The majority of instruments for behavioral or physiological emotion measurement (still) require lab setups which can be obtrusive for the user and are definitely more time-consuming and expensive. LEMtool provides a web based environment; users are asked to participate online and experiments can be setup really quickly.
• The abovementioned instruments are not able to provide detailed information on the exact spots and areas that evoke the emotions with the users. LEMtool’s main objective is to give insight in the the emotion, the area and the appraisal
• If you want to measure emotions, the abovementioned alternatives do not provide the insights that can help improve the design emotionally. In a user experience there is another important factor: the overal perception of the experience and perceived usability of the product. It is not possible to measure perception ‘objectively’ and in this case self-report can be especially helpful. LEMtool not only asks users to point out specific area’s and the emotions they evoke, but also WHY it makes them feel these. A result is vital insight in the perception the user has of the website.

More information can be found at the tool specific website www.lemtool.com

Related publications and references

Huisman, G. (2011). Visual Appeal and Affect in Websites. Unpublished master’s thesis, University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands.

Hout, M. (2003). Interactive Products and User Emotions. Unpublished master;s thesis, University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands

Capota, K, Hout, M., van & Geest, T.M., van der (2007). Measuring the Emotional Impact of Websites. A Study Combining a Dimensional and Discrete Emotion Approach in Measuring Visual Appeal of University Websites. In Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces Conference. 2007 . Helsinki.

Huisman, G. (2009). LEMtool – Visual Emotion Measurement in Digital Media. Unpublished bachelor’s thesis, University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands.

I would like to point you to a wonderful piece called the “User Experience White Paper – bringing clarity to the concept of user experience“. This was written and put together by a group of 30 experts, as a result of the  Dagstuhl Seminar on Demarcating User Experience, September 15-18, 2010.

Most importantly not a definite document, but according to the experts and also in my opinion, an important step towards a common understanding on user experience. Have a look and tell me what you think.

It wasn’t my first encounter with this type of devices, as in Korea this is actually a very common restaurant feature. Why Koreans use the call bell? This was nicely explained on a site I found:

Why do Korean Restaurants us a call bell?

As for the culture of Korean restaurant eating, there is no appetizer, entree, dessert type of menu. You order your meal, and you are given your food + banchan which is the Korean word for side dishes. The banchan is included with your meal. Perhaps you can think of it as small appetizers that come out at the same time as your meal. After you are done eating your food, you are usually given your check with some fruit pieces or even a cup of shik-hae which is a sweet rice drink. That would essentially be your dessert.

So most Koreans just eat and leave. We don’t chit chat and linger over dessert wine and creme brulee like Westerners, at least not the older generation. The bell system is put in place so as soon as the meal is over, the customer can press the button to get their check and leave. It’s also a great tool to help restaurants provide quick service to customers without invading their privacy. Haven’t you been in the situation where your waiter comes to check on you and you have a big mouthful of food in your mouth? Wrong timing, right? It’s just an easier way to run business to call your waiter when needed.

Wouldn’t a call bell in all restaurants be a welcome relief for all parties?

So, despite Spanish eating culture being completely the opposite from the Korean (Spanish take up to 2 hours for lunch ), the call bell also seems to work well within that context. So, I wonder, would such a simple concept work in most cultures? And, if so, why don’t we see them much more often? Similar concepts have proven to be successful within all types of settings (air planes for example, see image) and there are obviously many on the market. So, why isn’t it a common feature, and what is blocking it from becoming a real success in the restaurant business? It would seem to help them work more efficient and creat less irritation among both waiters and clients, wouldn’t it?

The organisation was in the hands of a truly marvelous team of students of the Tech de Monterrey university. I have never felt more pampered then in this conference. I don’t think I have spent a full hour in my hotel room, due to their continuous care to feed us and offer us drinks and great company GRACIAS A TODOS! I feel that I have made some wonderful new friends.

In the course of the 4 days I was in Querétaro, I gave a keynote presentation (see below) to a wonderful audience of around 350, a Get Emocional! workshop (26 participants) and taught a class to design students (thanks to @dianalbarran).

My talk

My talk focused on sketching the properties of a world in change and what role designers have in this, plus, a possible answer to how they can influence world change by design. I state that emotional design can be a key factor (Factor Clave) in creating mindful, meaningful products and services that assist world change and improve people’s lives. Below is a slightly shortened version of the actual presentation.