Designing for Emotion: Chapter 7

This week in my PR Publications class, I was asked to pick a chapter of our text, Designing for Emotion, to read for a final blog post. I chose to read the final chapter of the book, which is titled Risk & Reward.

One of the things I liked about the chapter was the idea that if people complain about your design, it might mean you’re doing something right. If video games have taught me anything, it is that if you encounter bad guys, you’re going in the right direction. Its not to say that these people are bad guys, but rather that going with the flow may be easy, but it isn’t the fun part of the game. Take me, for example–at the beginning of this course I was not crazy about the use of white space (I even mentioned it in one of my posts). Now, I like it a lot. The simpler and cleaner, the better. In other words, people will come around.

The thing I did not like about this chapter is that it didn’t really include any examples where changing a design was harmful for a company. The title of the chapter is Risk & Reward, but all I saw were rewarding examples. I like to learn from mistakes, even if they aren’t mine, so I would have liked to see an example of something for me to avoid in the future.