Designing For Emotion

After reading the book Designing for Emotion, I had a few thoughts about the first chapter.

Initially when I thought about designing for emotion Sarah McLachlan’s ASPCA commercials would naturally come to mind.

However, after reading the chapter I realized that design evokes emotion that does not have to be sad.  It can be like Betrabrand evoking the idea that their customer service can be like a buddy who bets on basketball games with the customer.  Emotional designs can  encompass any type of personality and emotion that humans display, and that leaves an infinite number of design possibilities.

One thing that I read in the chapter and didn’t necessarily agree with was when the author compared human’s physiological needs to operation and navigation functions on a website.  I just felt like that was comparing apples and oranges.  Human’s most basic needs like eating and breathing are no where close to a website’s ability to be functional to the main public.  A tech genius could probably figure out how to navigate through a complicated website while both a tech genius and an anti-internet person NEED to breathe air to live no matter what.