Designing for Emotion: Chapter 3

Finally, after two long weeks of defining stakeholders, figuring out Photoshop and crafting two direct mailers for OU Recruiting Services it is time to wrap up our assignment in PR Publications. Along with finalizing our direct mailers and taking them from Photoshop to the printshop our professor, Adam Croom, asked us to read chapter 3 in Designing for Emotion. This chapter talked about designing with personality.

One topic I found interesting in this chapter was the history of injecting personality into human things. An example the book used was the VW Beetle a.k.a. The Slugbug. The book talks about how the shape of the headlights and the scoop-shaped hood represents a “baby face,” which makes people react in a positive, uplifting behavior. While I never analyzed a vehicle in this way, once I started thinking about my own experience with the VW Bug and the “Herbie Fully Loaded” reference, I agree that injecting personality into human things can be beneficial to the design and marketing of a product.

I scanned this chapter multiple times looking for something I disagreed with and could not find a topic that distinctly stuck out to me. One statement that seemed on the edge of agreeing and disagree was that people are able to detect “inauthentic personality”. Personally, after reading the analysis breakdown of designing a personality for a design, there is a lot of reasoning put into why people design the way they do. With the extent of the analysis there is no way the everyday public is going to be able to point out specific features that do not suit the design; therefore, leaving the designed to be interpreted with an overall “gist” of the organization.