Emotional Design Read Online Free PDF Page A

Design—and for that matter, most problem solving—requires creative thinking followed
by a considerable period of concentrated, focused effort. In the first case, creativity, it is good for the designer to be relaxed, in a good mood. Thus, in brainstorming sessions, it is common to warm up by telling jokes and playing games. No criticism is allowed because it would raise the level of anxiety among the participants. Good brainstorming and unusual, creative thinking require the relaxed state induced by positive affect.
    Once the creative stage is completed, the ideas that have been generated have to be transformed into real products. Now the design team must exert considerable attention to detail. Here, focus is essential. One way to do this is through deadlines just slightly shorter than feel comfortable. Here is the time for the concentrated focus that negative affect produces. This is one reason people often impose deadlines on themselves, and then announce those deadlines to others so as to make them real. Their anxiety helps them get the work done.
    It is tricky to design things that must accommodate both creative thinking and focus. Suppose the design task is to build a control room for operators of a plant—think of a nuclear power plant or a large chemical-processing plant, but the same lessons apply to many manufacturing and production facilities. The design is meant to enhance some critical procedure or function—say to enable control room operators to watch over a plant and solve problems as they arise—so it is probably best to have a neutral or a slightly negative affect to keep people aroused and focused. This calls for an attractive, pleasant environment so that in normal monitoring, the operators are creative and open to explore new situations. Once some plant parameter approaches a dangerous level, however, the design should change its stance, yielding a negative affect that will keep the operators focused upon the task at hand.
    How do you design something so that it can change from invoking a positive affect to invoking a negative one? There are several ways. One is through the use of sound. The visual appearance of the plant can be positive and enjoyable. During normal operation, it is even possible to play light background music, unless the control room is located where the sounds of the plant operating can be used to indicate
its state. But as soon as any problem exists, the music should go away and alarms should start to sound. Buzzing, ringing alarms are negative and anxiety producing, so their presence alone might do the trick. Indeed, the problem is not to overdo it: too much anxiety produces a phenomenon known as “tunnel vision,” where the people become so focused they may fail to see otherwise obvious alternatives.
    The dangers of too much focus are well known to people who study accidents. Thus, special design and training is required of people if we want them to perform well under high stress. Basically, because of the extreme focus and tunnel vision induced by high anxiety, the situation has to be designed to minimize the need for creative thought. That’s why professionals are trained over and over again in accident scenarios, through training exercises and simulators, so that if a real incident occurs, they will have experienced it so many times in training that their responses follow automatically. But this training works only if the training is repeated frequently and performance is tested. In commercial aviation, the pilots and crew are well trained, but the passengers are not. Even though frequent fliers continually hear and see the instructions on how to escape the airplane in case of fire or crash, they sit passively, only partially attentive. They are not apt to remember them in an emergency.
    â€œFire,” yells someone in a theater. Immediately everyone stampedes toward the exits. What do they do at the exit door? Push. If the door doesn’t