A New Approach to Teaching Emotional Design

Emotional design focuses on providing intended users with a positive emotional experience. Thus far, the concept of emotional design has primarily been restricted to the fields of research and industry. Most professionals using emotional design slowly acquired the required skills by experience and without direct education. Teaching emotional design to design students has been overlooked due to its difficulty. This research introduces a new approach to teaching emotional design, which aims to prevent negative influences from being added to the products created by design students. A systematic method is introduced to make it easier for inexperienced design students to grasp emotional design. Students are first taught proper methods of data collection to determine users’ emotional requirements. Students are then taught how to summarize the data, as well as develop feasibility testing strategies to obtain promising ideas. The proposed teaching approach for emotional design has been proven efficient in the case study course conducted in this research. Graduate-level design students learned how to design products according to users’ emotional requirements. The students successfully produced several designs that clearly provided positive user experiences.