Design for pleasure as an interaction design objective

Abstract

Everyday life has a lot of interactive products. Some of these products are pleasurable during use and others are frustrating to users. Products that are designed as a system for performing a specific function without considering person’s perceptions and responses or users’ emotions, beliefs, preferences, perceptions, physical and psychological responses, may function with high efficiency, but are not pleasurable for the user. The interaction with these products is frustrating to user’s expectations. So the interactive product design is no longer limited to be well- looking. The pleasure is not only the formal aesthetics of the appearance, which is first step in stimulating the pleasure in interactive products, but there are many kinds of pleasure like physio-pleasure, psycho-pleasure, ideo-pleasure, socio-pleasure, pleasure of understanding, pleasure of interacting, and pleasure of using. The problem of the research is that the interactive designer cares about many basic design requirements and aspects, and they are expected that the product produces the pleasure of the user automatically, or by chance, or as a result of the experience of the designer. Pleasure is not considered in interaction design goal. The interactive designers need knowledge and methodology to enable them to design pleasurable interactive products. The user is no longer searches for products that only functional or easy to use, but also looking for products that cause pleasure and happiness. This research uses the knowledge collected about the interaction design principles and examples of the interactive products, the stages of experience design, and the pleasure types, which are many types, and how to achieve each type. Many references addressed the types of pleasure classification models from multiple perspectives. This research determined the most types that have influence in designing pleasurable interactive product to be taken into consideration like physio-pleasure, psycho-pleasure, pleasure of interacting, and pleasure of using.Objectives: (1) determine the most influential types of pleasures in the interactive product design. (2) put criteria to these types for interaction designer to follow. (3) propose a methodology for the pleasurable interactive product design process. Methodology:Verification of methodology has been done by designing an interactive pleasurable device that measures customer’s satisfaction with services offered to him at shopping center, taking into consideration the principles and criteria of interaction design and the types of determined pleasure at the research. The device called “Happy or Not”.