Emotional Design Read Online Free PDF

open, they push harder. But what if the door opens inward and must be pulled, not pushed? Highly anxious, highly focused people are very unlikely to think of pulling.
    When under high anxiety—high negative affect—people focus upon escape. When they reach the door, they push. And when this fails, the natural response is to push even harder. Countless people have died as a result. Now, fire laws require what is called “panic hardware.” The doors of auditoriums have to open outward, and they must open whenever pressure is applied.
    Similarly, designers of exit stairways have to block any direct path from the ground floor to those floors below it. Otherwise, people
using a stairway to escape a fire are likely to miss the ground floor and continue all the way into the basement—and some buildings have several levels of basements—to end up trapped.

The Prepared Brain
    Although the visceral level is the simplest and most primitive part of the brain, it is sensitive to a very wide range of conditions. These are genetically determined, with the conditions evolving slowly over the time course of evolution. They all share one property, however: the condition can be recognized simply by the sensory information. The visceral level is incapable of reasoning, of comparing a situation with past history. It works by what cognitive scientists call “pattern matching.” What are people genetically programmed for? Those situations and objects that, throughout evolutionary history, offer food, warmth, or protection give rise to positive affect. These conditions include:
    warm, comfortably lit places,
temperate climate,
sweet tastes and smells,
bright, highly saturated hues,
“soothing” sounds and simple melodies and rhythms,
harmonious music and sounds,
caresses,
smiling faces,
rhythmic beats,
“attractive” people,
symmetrical objects,
rounded, smooth objects,
“sensuous” feelings, sounds, and shapes.
    Similarly, here are some of the conditions that appear to produce automatic negative affect:
    heights,
sudden, unexpected loud sounds or bright lights,
“looming” objects (objects that appear to be about to hit the
observer),
extreme hot or cold,
darkness,
extremely bright lights or loud sounds,
empty, flat terrain (deserts),
crowded dense terrain (jungles or forests),
crowds of people,
rotting smells, decaying foods
bitter tastes,
sharp objects,
harsh, abrupt sounds,
grating and discordant sounds,
misshapen human bodies,
snakes and spiders,
human feces (and its smell),
other people’s body fluids,
vomit.
    These lists are my best guess about what might be automatically programmed into the human system. Some of the items are still under dispute; others will probably have to be added. Some are politically incorrect in that they appear to produce value judgments on dimensions society has deemed to be irrelevant. The advantage human beings have over other animals is our powerful reflective level that enables us to overcome the dictates of the visceral, pure biological level. We can overcome our biological heritage.
    Note that some biological mechanisms are only predispositions rather than full-fledged systems. Thus, although we are predisposed to be afraid of snakes and spiders, the actual fear is not present in all people: it needs to be triggered through experience. Although human language comes from the behavioral and reflective levels, it provides a
good example of how biological predispositions mix with experience. The human brain comes ready for language: the architecture of the brain, the way the different components are structured and interact, constrains the very nature of language. Children do not come into the world with language, but they do come predisposed and ready. That is the biological part. But the particular language you learn, and the accent with which you speak it, are determined through experience. Because the brain is prepared to learn language,