The Emotional Impact of Surface and Prototyping Properties in Product Design

Abstract

The emotional experience of products can have enormous impact on the overall experience: happy users are more accepting and open-minded. Being able to improve users' moods through product interaction has clear benefits and is currently the focus of designers all over the world. The purpose of this study is to help establish generalizable and useful relationship(s) between design parameters specific to the sense of touch and the emotional response to tactile experiences. Participants (N=16) explored blocks of varying roughness, hardness, fidelity (a real or virtual object), and affordance (whether or not the object lends itself to being tactually explored). In terms of surface properties, increases in texture roughness elicits more negative emotional responses (p≤0.013) while changes in hardness showed no effect. In terms of prototyping factors of fidelity and affordance, surprisingly a decrease in stimuli fidelity elicited more favourable emotional responses (p≤0.052) and lower affordance conditions generated faster response times (p≤0.032). In addition, males gave emotional responses in less time than females (p≤0.03). These results are discussed in terms of cognitive processing as well as product prototyping, packaging and displaying.

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