Publications

The 7th international conference on Design and Emotion @ Illinois Institute of Technology

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The Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, and the Design & Emotion Society are pleased to invite you to participate in the 7th International Conference on Design & Emotion in Chicago. The International Conference on Design & Emotion is a forum held every other year where practitioners, researchers and industry leaders meet and exchange knowledge and insights concerning the cross-disciplinary field of design and emotion. The conference will offer workshops, research paper presentations, design case presentations, and poster presentations.

This conference covers various issues including Design for Environments, Service Design, Strategic Design and Business, and Foundation for Design and Emotion. I presented my work on context-dependent design evaluations.

I was pleased to have conversations with many creative designers as well as insightful design researchers. In particular, four presentation excited me. Two of them discuss new product development and the other two discuss product design.

1. “Improvisational Comedy and Product Design Ideation: Making Non-Obvious Connections between Seemingly Unrelated Thing”

Barry Kudrowitz and David Wallace from MIT try to identify those who are good at developing new products. Inspired by the procedural similarity between making a comedy and developing a new product, they propose that comedians are good new product developers. Then, they support their hypothesis by demonstrating that the quantity and the quality of cartoon captions made by comedians are greater and better than those made by non-comedians.

2. “User Research Methods: Distinctive Need Expressions from an In-depth Interview and a Generative Method Market Research”

Hyesun Hwang and Ki-Ok Kim from Sungkyunkwan University compare two user research methods, in-depth interviews and generative methods (prototyping). They argue that the two methods collect different consumer needs. An empirical study suggests that the in-depth interview produces concrete, negative and past-oriented problems, whereas the generative method produces abstract, positive and future-oriented ideas.

3. “The Cute Look: Baby-Schema Effects in Product Design”

Linda Miesler from University of St. Gallen investigates whether face-like features of the car fronts (head lights and air intake) are processed analog to human faces (eyes and mouth). She demonstrates in an experiment that enlarging the headlights (“larger eyes”) and increasing the size of the air intake (“thicker lips”) led people to perceive the car fronts cuter.

4. “The Relationship between Eco Design and Emotional Experiences”

Heesook Jung from Seoul National University proposes that ecofriendly behavior requires effort and, therefore, some motivation such as playfulness should be employed to help consumers behave ecofriendly. She presents a case of Lohas, an ecofriendly Japanese bottled water. According to her, the sound that an empty bottle creates when squeezed leads consumers to behave more ecofriendly (e.g., squeezing bottles) (see Lohas commercial).

Cases

Human Factors symposium

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I attended a Human Factors symposium at the University of Toronto. It was organized by the HFIG (Human Factors Interest Group) and titled as Celebration of Applied Human Factors Research, in Honour of Prof. John W. Senders’ 90th Birthday.

At the symposium, I noticed an interesting connection between decision-making and Human Factors. Research in decision-making studies decision biases and provides prescriptions to eliminate or mitigate them. Similarly, HF researchers study errors from the real-life examples and suggest practical recommendations to overcome those errors.

For instance, John Senders and his colleagues studied errors of train drivers, vehicle drivers, airplane drivers, and medical practitioners in terms of their processing visual information. (In 1960s, John drove in Boston wearing a helmet and a visor that occluded his vision to find how often drivers need to see front!) Then, they provided recommendations to the city of Toronto, simulate trainings for pilots, or even develop devices for doctors such as Head Mounted Display).

Since Human Factors research investigates human behavior issues elegantly, which has a great potential to business. Shumin Zhai, for instance, presented his business which was developed from a research project. About 10 years ago, his team developed an innovative text input system for a touch screen device. It does not simply improve a conventional keypad to make it easy to use (e.g., laying out keys differently). Rather, it allows users to use their gestures to input texts. It is now called as ShapeWriter.

To me, Don Norman‘s call for Human Factors researchers to work with business people sounds right. I believe designers need business education to communicate with business people effectively. I found a wide variety of business-able issues were discussed in the symposium but hardly found any people with business background.

I hope to find more business students working at Human Factors community in the future.

Cases

Evolution of design thinking

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In 2006, what was design thinking? (see more at Luke Wroblewsky‘s blog)

Roger Martin

When it comes to innovation, business has much to learn from design. The philosophy in design shops is, ‘try it, prototype it, and improve it’. Designers learn by doing. The style of thinking in traditional firms is largely inductive – proving that something actually operates – and deductive – proving that something must be. Design shops add abductive reasoning to the fray – which involves suggesting that something may be, and reaching out to explore it.

Tim Brown

Because it’s pictorial, design describes the world in a way that’s not open to many interpretations. Designers, by making a film, scenario, or prototype, can help people emotionally experience the thing that the strategy seeks to describe.

Jeanne Liedtka

Design thinking is synthetic. Out of the often-disparate demands presented by sub-units’ requirements, a coherent overall design must emerge. Design thinking is abductive in nature. It is primarily concerned with the process of visualizing what might be, some desired future state and creating a blueprint for realizing that intention. Design thinking is opportunistic: the designer seeks new and emergent possibilities. Design thinking is dialectical. The designer lives at the intersection of often-conflicting demands – recognizing the constraints of today’s materials and the uncertainties that cannot be defined away, while envisioning tomorrow’s possibilities.

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Now in 2010, what is design thinking?

I recently came across a carefully written post at Core 77 about design thinking. It was done by Kevin McCullagh and titled as “Design thinking: Everywhere and Nowhere, Reflections on The Big Re-Think.”

In fact, design thinking always meant different things to different players. For some it was about teaching managers how to think like designers; for others, it was about designers tackling problems that used to be the preserve of managers and civil servants; and for others still, it was anything said on the subject of design that sounded smart. To most, it is was merely a new spin on design. All its proponents were, however, united by their ambition for design to play a more strategic role in the world than ‘making pretty.’ Who could argue with that?

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Now in 2023, what is design thinking?

People are gravitated towards different attitudes about design thinking. Some are disappointed by the fact that design thinking fails to produce visible, lasting outcomes. Others pay attention to its unique role in helping people creative. Design thinking might not be a short-term, direct tool, but rather a long-term, indirect mindset.

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Reference 1

Ackermann, R. (2023). Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong. MIT Technology Review.

An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.

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Reference 2

Bertao, R. A., Jung, C. H., Chung, J., & Joo, J. (2023). Design thinking: A customized blueprint to train R & D personnel in creative problem-solving. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 48, 101253.

Organizations have sought to adopt design thinking aiming at innovation. However, implementing such a creative problem-solving approach based on designers’ mindsets and practices requires the navigation of obstacles. Corporate structure and culture hinder the adoption course, and cognitive barriers affect non-designer engagement. In this regard, training has been used as a means of easing the process. Although considered a crucial step in design thinking implementation, research on training initiatives is scarce in the literature. Most studies mirror that about d.school boot camp and innovative programs developed by companies globally remain unknown. This practice-oriented paper investigates a training blueprint tailored for LG Corporation in South Korea, targeting R & D personnel working in several affiliates that needed creative problem-solving skills to improve business performance. The study findings unveil a customized initiative that expanded the established boot camp model by adding preceding activities to increase learning opportunities and enable empathetic observation. Fundamentally, the customization strategy aimed to provide participants with customer-oriented tools to solve business problems. In addition, the training program reframed the design thinking steps in order to make it relevant for employees and foster corporate implementation goals. Ultimately, this case study supplies literature describing a training blueprint to disseminate design thinking considering two dimensions: individual adoption and organizational implementation challenges.

Figure 1 The overall structure and time allocation of the d.school’s design thinking training program
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Dieter Rams, ten principles of good design

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Braun products by Dieter Rams (above) and Apple products by Jonathan Ive (below)

Dieter Rams listed 10 principles of good design. He is a legendary product designer who has developed a list of the Braun products and is still influencing our life through Jonathan Ive’s Apple devices. The above image comes from a  Guardian article and the below image comes from Vitsoe.com. You could find his 10 principles for good design here.

Dieter Rams

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Context for good design

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Many design awards have their own answers about what makes a product well designed; it must be original, it must be aesthetically appealing, and it must be useful. Similarly, marketing researchers have also studied that newness, beauty, and usefulness contributes to the evaluation of a product. However, whether product usage context or the outer space of a product affects whether a product is well designed has been little discussed.

I found a nice example which shows the impact of usage context on design. Designers from Industrial Facility, a UK design studio, developed a Bath Radio for Muji. It is a radio but looks like a set of shampoo and rinse. This example shows that consumers may consider a product well designed when its design matches its usage context.

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Jump Associates, unique office

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Last summer, I visited two design consulting firms in California: IDEO and Jump Associates. Visiting them raised several interesting research questions.

I was impressed by the space of the “Jump Associates.” It occupies two floors in one building and the two floors are connected by a steel stair inside the building. Employees can freely go up and down without using the external elevator. Besides, Jump Associates has several interesting rooms including “Zen Room.” This room has a low ceiling with several cushions. The Zen Room is often used for consumers who want to express their needs and ideas in a warm, comfortable setting. This is interesting because I have not seen any work telling the value of small sized space with a low ceiling. Instead, much work suggests that high ceiling facilitates creativity.

I wonder if spaces (rooms and their ceiling heights) are carefully selected for different stage gates of a product development process. Designers may want to collect consumer needs in a low-ceiling, close space but they may want a high-ceiling, open space to generate concepts.

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IDEO, three roles of prototypes

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Prototypes have different forms. According to an article written by two apple computer employees, Houde and Hill (1997), prototypes prototype the “role” of a product, its “look and feel,” or its “implementation.” Therefore, designers should choose a right type of a prototype.

One step further, prototypes serve different roles. When I visited IDEO last summer, I found three boards which describe what prototypes do; they “inspire,” “experiment (evolve),” or “validate (specify)” a product. This suggests that different types of prototypes can serve different purposes for a product.

Given that there are different types of prototypes and different objectives of prototypes, designers should create different types of prototypes for different objectives. For instance, the “role” prototype can be more appropriate when designers inspire a product, while the “look and feel” prototype can be better when designers validate a product.

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Reference

Houde, S., & Hill, C. (1997). What do prototypes prototype?. In Handbook of human-computer interaction (pp. 367-381). North-Holland.

Prototypes are widely recognized to be a core means of exploring and expressing designs for interactive computer artifacts. It is common practice to build prototypes in order to represent different states of an evolving design, and to explore options. How- ever, since interactive systems are complex, it may be difficult or impossible to create prototypes of a whole design in the formative stages of a project. Choosing the right kind of more focused prototype to build is an art in itself, and communicating its limited purposes to its various audiences is a critical aspect of its use.

Cases

Do people like an unexpected design of a product?

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burger king

We often meet a product with a unique form and find it difficult to guess how it works. Examples include a donut-looking tape by 3M, a burger/fries/coke-looking USB key by Burger King, or a chocolate-looking mirror by Meiji, a Japanese chocolate manufacturer. One of my Japanese friends even pointed me a website in which a designer keeps posting his/her design prototypes (Prototype 1000).

I wonder whether consumers like a product more when its form and function are inconsistent than when they are consistent.

Prototype1000

Noseworthy, T. J., & Trudel, R. (2011). Looks Interesting, but What Does It Do? Evaluation of Incongruent Product Form Depends on Positioning. Journal of Marketing Research, 48(6), 1008–1019.

Marketers struggle with how best to position innovative products that are incongruent with consumer expectations. Compounding the issue, many incongruent products are the result of innovative changes in product form intended to increase hedonic appeal. Crossing various product categories with various positioning tactics in a single meta-analytic framework, the authors find that positioning plays an important role in how consumers evaluate incongruent form. The results demonstrate that when a product is positioned on functional dimensions, consumers show more preferential evaluations for moderately incongruent form than for congruent form. However, when a product is positioned on experiential dimensions, consumers show more preferential evaluations for congruent form than for moderately incongruent form. Importantly, an increase in perceived hedonic benefits mediates the former, whereas a decrease in perceived utilitarian benefits mediates the latter. The mediation effects are consistent with the view that consumers must first understand a product’s functionality before engaging in hedonic consumption.

Jaewoo Joo | design thinking, behavioral economics, customer experience