Consultant

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.

Our motto: You matter to us, but we love your clients even more

In a material world where people seek beyond stuff, the people who design this stuff have a big responsibility. They have to fill the gap between creation and concerns. We facilitate this. Our approach is about combining deep questioning (Why do we need this?) and great design (How can we improve this?). We put people before technology. We design for experience, for emotions.

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
• Put people before technology!

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