Basic Principles and New Methods on Emotional Product Design

Abstract

Emotional design is one of the most important methods in modern product design. It was highlighted after Donald A. Norman published his book Emotional design: why we love (or hate) everyday things. Emotional design addresses people’s needs and hopes which is in the center of the development of product design and product technology. Due to the lack of strong theoretical basis and quantitative analysis, many products can’t reach the goal of their designers with Emotional feelings, nor can consumer’s emotional understandings be similar to the designers’ emotional expectations. This paper analyzes the concept of emotional design and some difficulties which designers must to be faced in their emotional designing works, discusses on product shape design according to emotional design. On this basis, the Kansei engineering and emotional design methods are described in details.