Designing for Emotion: Chapter 2

Part of this week’s required OU Public Relations Publications students to read chapter two of Designing for Emotion by Aarron Walter and write a brief blog post. Chapter two is title “Designing for Humans” and in this chapter Walter briefly addresses the challenge of designing for many different types of people. It was definitely an interesting chapter. It was the kind that actually made me think about design. As one of our professors in Gaylord would say, it’s the kind of chapter “that makes you go ‘ummph.'”

A lot of the facts and analogies Walter talks about I was actually really familiar with because I’m a psychology minor. He starts off talking about how people actually have very similar ways of detecting different emotions and everyone generally expresses emotions like sadness, happiness, or disgust in similar ways regardless of cultural background. I definitely agreed with Walter on this and that it has valuable application to design. Because people react in similar ways to emotions and have similar ways of showing emotion, we as designers don’t have to worry too much about over designing and trying to reach millions of types of people with one design. Instead, we can reach millions of people with one design because they share similar emotional cues.

But when it comes to things that make you go “ummph,” Walter’s baby analogy is one of those things. I’m not sure if analogy is the right word, but we’re going to go with it for now. In this chapter, Walter says that some of the reasons we find babies cute is because of the proportions of their bodies: big heads, small bodies, and bulging eyes. Though I would agree that generally this is was causes us to think they’re cute, he later mentions that from an evolutionary perspective these proportions that cause us to think babies are cute is actually a mechanism to keep humans from killing their offspring.

Okaaaaayyyy Walter…if you say so.