Industrial design strategies for eliciting surprise

Abstract

This paper reports on strategies industrial designers use when attempting to elicit surprise. Thirty senior representatives from influential design organisations were interviewed. A situational analysis of the responses suggests strategies that designers use as motivation for starting a design project. These include observations of social issues in the designers’ world and observations of their personal experience at behavioural, cognitive and emotional levels. We also found strategies that designers apply during the design process: using archetypes in unexpected contexts/objects, challenging assumptions of appearance, magical interactions, the smart doubling of things and unexpected scale. We suggest that a research through design approach may uncover further strategies that designers use implicitly and did not explicitly mention during the interviews.