May 29th 2009. Barcelona

The second edition of the « HOO-HA Sensorimix Festival » receives in Barcelona some specialists in sensory and product development. These speakers shake up the classic sensory methods and go all out to inject them with originality, discrepancy and innovative experience tested on many applications.

Whether you’re a specialist in Design, Marketing, Sensory Evaluation, QC/QA, or R&D, this festival is for you.

Programme: demonstrations, meetings and exchanges around the 5 senses. An out-of-this world trip in the heart of a unique sensory experience!

Download the official flyer and registration form >>>

I hope to see you all in Barcelona this spring and we’ll have a cocktail or two

As a case study for the project, it was chosen that the focus will be laid on the `hotel experience’, that is, the experience of a guest staying at a hotel. The instrument should be able to measure the emotional responses of the guest towards the various touch points (user-service interaction points) he encounters along his journey as a hotel guest.

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David could use a hand in his first experiment, care to help out?

“For my MSc. Graduation project, I’m conducting a small study regarding the emotions you experience while in a hotel, and I’d like to ask your help remembering some of the times that you have stayed in a hotel and tell me some of the things you’ve experienced by using the following online survey: www.bluehaired.com/hotel_survey

It can take as little as 5 minutes to help a bit and I will really appreciate your time and effort.”

Also see:

SusaGroup - creating meaningful experiences
Delft University of Technology
Bluehaired

Founded by design lovers in 1998, Design Addict was one of the first important websites dedicated to product design.
Created without any commercial purpose, its goal has always been the sharing of knowledge between net surfers, regarding the history of design as much as the contemporary design field.

During these 10 first years of activity, the same question was asked to us, again and again: “Where can I buy this wonderful object that I saw on your site?“. We came to the conclusion that we had to find an answer to the needs of our visitors and we now have the pleasure to announce the opening of a new section on Design Addict:

The radar

The Radar is a platform where vintage design stores, auction houses, etc. can easily show the items that they have for sale.
On the other hand, the buyers, private or professionals, have access to the inventory of many dealers in one place and can easily find furniture, lamps, accessories… via various search criteria (typology, designer, producer, period, seller’s location or price range).

It’s simple and it works! Although this new service has just been launched, one can already find more than 500 items and the sellers keep on adding items so regularly that one can easily predict thousands of items in a few months.

The Radar is thus a tool that allows collectors and interior designers to easily scan the market and detect specific pieces.
For design lovers, it is also a good way to discover 20th century design through creations from some of the greatest designers. Select a designer name or a period of your choice and enjoy the visit!

Why is the Radar different from other market places?

• Design Addict does not take commissions on the sales. Prices are therefore the same as on the dealers’ website. The dealer does not increase his price to compensate such a cost.
• Each listing is reviewed by a design addict expert before being published online.
• Design only. The Radar is dedicated to 20th century designer creation, we stay on topic. No boring antics or bad quality reproduction here.

Just looking at the simple prototype, the emotional effect of the later product was clear to see. Well, of course, the round shape is not new, but we seem to have forgotten that many emotionally significant objects have this shape. Whether it’s a full moon, wedding ring, the pupil of the eye, clocks, CDs and LPs or simply a ball, we human beings react in a positive way to the circle and the globe. They draw us to them and let us connect experiences. Round mirrors on the wall, round lamps and round windows are all familiar, but a cabinet is unusual. A picture that quickly came to mind was the sunset with its round disc over the horizon. You can re-enact this picture everywhere with a round wall cabinet.

Added to the shape, you now had the lighting radiating out in all directions and surrounding the cabinet like a corona. Changing colours add a dimension of time as the ensemble is continuously changing. So what was it now, a piece of furniture or a lighting object?

In order to make it a piece of furniture, it was important to give the design a purpose. And in spite of the shape, it was possible to create a container that could hold objects within the chosen proportions. And even perhaps give these a better framework than other shapes.

It was interesting to note that it was mostly women who responded to the cabinet spontaneously at the Cologne Furniture Fair that has just come to an end.

About the author:

Michael Rottmar is an electrical engineering technician and designer. He has worked for international companies in marketing and sales among other areas for many years. Here, his enthusiasm for the emotional components of a product also grew. In 2008, Michael realised his ambition to put his ideas into practice and founded his own company, miroco. The interplay of shape, colour and light became a passion, and the first product to come out of this is the round wall cabinet called rotondo. www.miroco.com

Enriching is a beautifully designed book, based on a workshop that was initiated by the Design & Emotion Society. It consisted of two sessions in Hong Kong and The Netherlands. The book is not merely a summary, but its design, the examples and the extensive theory make it a book to keep on the coffee table for inspiration. Personally, I think the format of the workshop by itself can be implemented as a renewed design process in almost every organisation. Therefore, do not hesitate and buy this one for under the Christmas tree. Enjoy!

Check it out at www.designandemotion.org.

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About the book:

In the summer of 2008 twenty designers worked on the case: “How to enrich the airport experience by designing interventions with an intended emotional effect?” under the supervision of three design experience experts. The workshop was an initiative of the Design & Emotion Society, a platform stimulating emotion and experience driven design.

The aim of the workshop was to create a number of design cases in which the emotions of the passengers would serve as the starting point for enriching the airport experience. During the workshop, interventions were designed guided by a theoretical model concerning the emotion process. The theory, the process, the sub-results and all final concepts are comprised in the book entitled: Enriching. Not specifically the end results, but clarifying the application of the emotion theory and the structured design process were the main goals of this book. In addition to attention for the process and results, the book provides a tangible representation of the vibrant activity of the cross disciplinary and cross cultural workshop.

Enriching the airport experience
The airport was chosen as a subject because of the dynamics and richness of this environment, in which, due to the large number of stimuli present, emotions play an intriguing role. Three days of workshop in Hong Kong followed. First, samples of airport experiences were collected during a visit to the airport of Hong Kong. After analysing the samples the most interesting pieces of experience were selected, which on their turn were thoroughly investigated by means of the theory. This provided profound insights in the role of emotions in these experiences and in how to influence these emotions with interventions. Each of the five groups developed multiple concepts based on a desired airport experience. In Delft, where the second part of the workshop took place, each group developed its most promising intervention into a worked out concept.

Design & Emotion Society and the Open Minds program
The workshop was organized by the Design & Emotion Society, an international platform which has facilitated numerous workshops in many countries since its foundation in 1999. Since the workshops have always been evaluated with much enthusiasm and experienced as very inspiring by participants from the three core branches of the society (design practice, corporate and research), a way to make the process and results of the workshop accessible to a larger public was sought for. The Open Minds program of the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, bringing together Dutch and Chinese designers, enabled the society to organise the workshop and publish the results in a book.

About the Design & Emotion Society
The Design & Emotion Society is an international network of researchers, designers and industry, which aims at stimulating emotion and experience driven design. The goal of the network is to share knowledge and methods in the area of product design. Next to workshops an international conference is organised biannually. The society was founded in 1999 and the board is situated in the Netherlands

“It seems, you have to leave to find out where you are really coming from.” In the Netherlands, this phrase could have perfectly been read from a traditional ‘sayings-tile’ hanging from a nail in the toilet. It could also have been something that a wise Buddhist monk told you while visiting a Japanese temple for spiritual guidance.

This is not the case though. In fact, it is Dutchman Laurens van den Acker, sharing with me the story of his journey to become the General Manager of the Design Division of the Mazda Motor Corporation. Van den Acker graduated in 1990 at the Industrial Design Department of Delft University of Technology and since has worked for Volvo, Audi and Ford, where he became chief designer. For him, he says, it has been more than a privilege to now work in a third different continent. “It doesn’t just give me the work experience, but also life experience”, he explains. “I come from the southern part of The Netherlands. When I moved to the north of Holland, I discovered that I really came from the south. When I moved to Italy, I found out that I was Dutch. Then, through Germany I arrived in America and found out that I was European. And now I moved from a western culture to an eastern culture and I am finding out that I am really western. You find out a lot about your culture when you are moving away from your comfort zone.”

As Van Den Acker immediately left Holland after his graduation, he never really felt part of the Dutch design scene. However, there are some typical traits that he thinks come in handy for any Dutch designer or manager working abroad. “We communicate easily, are pretty straight-forward, tolerant and still, quite democratic. We understand the necessity to build a consensus and are not very authoritarian in doing so.” Even though it is known that in Asian cultures building a consensus is of the greatest importance, the Dutch way of reaching a consensus is not necessarily similar or helpful in a Japanese company. Van den Acker explains that this has to do with the fact that in a Japanese culture, the team is more important than you are as an individual. The team speaks with ‘one voice’ as they call it in Japan.

This difference with western cultures also influences the design process in an important way. “In a western culture, somebody has an idea, then you’ll have a meeting with the team, and finally show it to the boss, and the boss will say ‘great, we’re gonna do this’. Ironically, in a western culture, you are still very reliant upon the boss to make the decision. Then you will go through a really swirly road towards the goal, as the boss will probably tell you lots of things to change or adjust. In a Japanese or eastern culture process, you have an idea, you have a meeting, and before you decide to even speak to the boss, you speak to everybody. You ask everybody his or her opinion and build consensus that way. That process takes a lot of time, which often drives western people crazy. But, once you then come to the meeting where the decision needs to be taken with the boss, he will see that the whole team is on board and it will be very hard for him to say no. And then the road to the goal is straight and short.”

The observation that the brand and the team are the most important in a Japanese business helped Van den Acker tremendously in his first big assignment: creating a new design philosophy for Mazda. Before he did anything, he asked everybody if they wanted to make a big step or a small step. Everybody immediately said they wanted to make a big step. This opened important doors for Van den Acker. “If you can indicate that what you are planning to do in terms of design is the right thing to do, then management is very willing to support you all the way. If you do it because you want to impress your friends, you’re off track”, he states.

The new design philosophy was introduced in 2006 with the launch of the Nagare concept car at the Los Angeles Auto Show. Its name ‘Nagare’ translates into English as ‘flow’ and Van den Acker and his designers specifically studied motion and the effect it has on natural surroundings when creating this vehicle. “I wanted to create something new with the design team. But make it really communicate what we stand for, and one of the things that we stand for is the ‘emotion of motion’ as we call it.  I said to the team, I need something that expresses motion in a completely new and different way. I looked at what the designers had on the desks, the images that the guys displayed in their presentations, the inspirational images that they had up on the walls. And what striked me was that a lot of what they had was nature, but they were still sketching the same old cars. I said ‘guys, if this is what you like then I need to see it in the car. So, if you see those lines of nature, I want to see those lines in the bodylines of the car.’ And they were looking at me like, ‘are you serious?’ I said ‘yeah!’” The Nagare design philosophy did not only feel natural to the designers, but also to everybody that Van den Acker showed the concepts to. “I had somebody in the office that I was talking to, and somebody else dropped by and saw the fibreglass model out of the corner of his eyes. He stopped, walked towards the model, set on his knees and touched the body side. He had to feel what he was seeing to believe it. Then I thought, now we have something, when we have people literally touch our cars.”

The power of Nagare is that it seems to appeal to everybody, as nature is such a universal concept, and it goes a lot deeper than just aesthetic appeal, as Van den Acker continues to explain. “If we treat Nagare as just a couple of textures on a body side, then it won’t live a long live. If we treat it as a design philosophy that we are starting to apply to body side surfaces, the details in the head lights, the interior, the choosing of the stitches, the materials, the textures, then it has the chance to become a design philosophy that can live for a generation or so. If we treat it as a true state of mind, then it has the chance to live with us for multiple generations. It will be up to us to get there, and of course, this is my goal.” It all seems to feel natural to Van den Acker, who puts his own emotion in motion to make cars that feel natural to all of us.

<< Download the magazine “Created in Holland” >>

The purpose is to explore the meaning of “good design” as it pertains to consumer products. Deconstruction here is an exploration of the form, function, and usability of these products by way of emotional response, objective analysis, and subjective commentary.

To that end, the authors want to know what you think and feel about the products that are illustrated on the website.

If you have actually used any of these products, know interesting or little known facts about them, or have a visceral response or personal perspective that you would like to share, write it up as a comment on this site. If they select your entry for inclusion in the print book, you will have a byline with your comment and you will be included in the contributor section.

Visit the website to participate

Design & Emotion Conference Highlights video

The 6th International Conference on Design & Emotion has come to an end. It has been an exciting week and we can look back with pride, joy and pleasure to an amazing achievement thanks to the organizing parties: The Design & Emotion Society and Polytechnic University Hong Kong.

Please have a look at some of the highlights in the video below, which has been very well recorded and edited by Gilbert Fok (camera) and Chu Ho Yin (Editing) of the Multimedia Innovation Centre of the School of Design.

3rd Conference day - a photo impression

Another busy, hectic, interesting, overwhelming conference day. Below are the pictures to prove it!


2nd Conference day - a photo impression

Today was an exciting day, we started with Donald Norman’s opening keynote on Sociable Design. Later Jan Chipchase gave us insight in his interesting research methods and incredible collection of insightful photos from so many countries around the world. Also, many interesting paper presentations were held, lots of conversations and new contacts were made during the breaks and a non-alcoholic cocktail (in Hong Kong no alcohol is allowed on University property) ended our day. Click below for some photos I quickly made: