Emotional Design

1. This reading focuses on the idea of how we respond emotionally to designs: how we use products, what makes them easier or harder to use, and what causes us to like or dislike using them. Visceral, behavioral, and reflective design play into the marketing and marketability of a product. (These types of design and marketing strategies activate the senses, selling based upon what is sensually attractive, serves a certain purpose, and ) If something is attractive under these types of marketing, does it sell better? (The answer, according to Norman, may is yes, due largely to what society and culture dictates is attractive, necessary, or , and thus, what people are inclined to buy.)

2.  This chapter covers a much wider range of topics than the first chapter we covered by this same author. In "The Design of Everyday Things," Norman examines ideas of what a product needs to be or have or do in order to serve its purpose as an item we can feasibly use to serve everyday purposes. "Emotional Design" goes in depth to discuss designs we appreciate, reasons why we appreciate them, and the structures and theories by which we understand what makes a design we want to buy and keep using for some time. These types of design include visceral (a design that stimulates the senses), behavioral (the function and purpose of the design and how well they are served), and reflective (the "message, culture, or meaning of a product or its use").

3. My USB splitter that I bought for my laptop works very successfully as a visceral design. It plugs into a single USB port but branches into five, so that four devices can be plugged in instead of one. The reason it is viscerally attractive is because it is shaped like a stick figure, which sounds really stupid but in real life looks like a clever idea, and thus attracted me to buy it. A successful behavioral design would be my parents' plasma screen TV, which is crazy functional and noticeably superior to the older tube-televisions in my parents' house. I would say a reflective design success would be, for an example, a building or location with a sleek and stimulating interior design: one mentally reacts to being in this restaurant, and reflects upon being in a place where one should dress or act a certain way. Perhaps an example of this would be the basement lobby of Radio City Music Hall in New York City, whose carpeting, columns, and wall decor all contain dark colors, mirrors, and diamond shapes  to the psychology that these things make the room seem bigger and darker, thus influencing its customers to act quieter and more refined. Each thing is successful as its type of design due to the focuses of the designers and the success they found due to research, modeling after trials and failures of other products, and successful marketing.