ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we will look at how future designers-or other interested students of market cultures —can learn to understand people’s pleasure. Pleasure is a fundamental human aspect of products, services, and living experience. But what that pleasurable product or experience is, few can say. Recent design historians point to the influence of context (Sparke 1987): what is desirable or pleasurable is changing over time and space. Context-rich information may thus be of help to the designers. Wisdom on how humans seek pleasure has always been around, Aristotle emphasised pleasure as a perfect whole following various practices (see Aristotle, in Stigen 1996). Yet the product success literature seldom explicates this holistic experience beyond the functional, coherence, and fit arguments (Bowen et al. 1994) or the more diffuse product superiority or uniqueness character (Cooper 1993). Nonetheless, since the pleasurable seems to be on the increase
ABSTRACT
If the late industrial society is being transformed by the search for new cultural and emotional experiences, industrial design needs to extend its knowledge and creativity in the direction of more culture-creative and pleasure-based human factors. To improve forthcoming designers’ market-cultural understanding and imagination beyond their own subculture, a range of students’ field-studies were conducted in an industrial design-school context. This chapter describes the benefits and challenges of combining an observational and a scenario-inspired approach in a time-compressed field-study. It focuses on the art of capturing actual codes and dynamics among stage-setters and users engaged in pleasurable practices. This qualitative designresearch experimentation is relevant for design in business. Iterative tools combining elements of future-research with ethnography and socio-cultural studies provide rapid exposure to lifecontexts of emerging groups, which may ground and inspire empathic and imaginative designing taking Homo ludens into account.
