ABSTRACT
As people become more sensitive to dimensions of products that go beyond traditional aspects of usability, the need to create emotional resonance between people and products increases. However, designers lack a shared understanding and language for emotion within the context of design. This paper describes research towards creating a framework of emotional experiences that is usable by designers for new product conception. We base this research on three prominent approaches to emotion and experience expressed by Dewey’s Art as Experience, Carlson’s Experienced Cognition, and Csikszentmihalyi’s The Meaning of Things. These approaches represent the fields of philosophy, cognitive science, and social science, three fields that converge in design research and practice. By extracting points of intersection across bodies of research, we have begun to synthesize these approaches into a single framework that will help designers to discover and understand opportunities for new products that stimulate, enhance, or change emotional experiences.
