Experience Design Tool: Encouraging designers to consider different design and emotion strategies

This paper presents an overview of the existing research in the area of design and emotion and the resulting design strategies that have emerged to support it. Design strategies concerning, pleasure, personality, memories and longevity, self-expression, the senses and novelty are discussed. This paper then presents a design tool, called the 'Experience Design Tool', developed by the author, to provide guidance and enhance creativity when considering the emotional aspects of design. The tool, which supports the idea generation phase of the design process, provides advice, product examples and probing questions to encourage designers to consider a number of emotional design strategies to enhance product experience. The aim of the tool is to translate the research generated by the design and emotion community into a form that design students can easily understand and utilise. In order to assess the effectiveness of the Experience Design Tool, it was used within a 2^nd year undergraduate product design project. The process of using the tool, together with the feedback from the students on its usefulness, is presented for discussion.