“Emotion is the state or capability of having a feeling aroused to the point of awareness.”
Richard Buchanan
Much of design today is about the rational and logical aspect of the artificial world – not so much discussion on the emotional aspect (more blogging on this topic to come).
I’ve noticed a lot of concept maps start off with a phase of “awareness.” Whether it’s Alcoholic’s Anonymous or some other project that tries to get people to exercise more, much of the products and services offered in the world want people/users to become aware of their situation or context.
So how do you do that? Are emotions triggered by some kind of stimulus? That is certainly one way to look at how emotions work in our lives. Even when people talk about emotions starting in the brain, they talk of stimuli. Much of psychology focuses on this aspect of emotion.
I think it was William James who used the example of a bear. If you see a bear, do you run from the bear because you’re afraid of the bear or are you actually afraid of the bear b/c you are running from the bear? James thought that you can actually feel better if you start to smile, not the other way around.
So, then, these things we call feelings, is it always reactionary to some kind of stimulus? Perhaps the stimulus happens internally – the way Plato talks about self-motion in Phaedrus. Is this what awareness is – self-motion towards an object? And of course Spinoza has something to say about what that object might be (I’m getting all this from Dick’s Emotion and Reason in Design class, btw).
I’m just thinking out loud since I can now see applications of my education in the professional work place. There’s talk about emotions, but many do not understand the range of interpretations. For example, someone come in today to give a presentation on how to measure emotion with metrics, a very entitative view of emotions. Talked about stimuli and the range of emotions (happy, sad, pleasurable, not pleasurable, etc). However, this is just one way of looking at emotions. Emotions CAN be viewed as a science where you try to break down an experience and try to isolate “feelings.” However, there’s more than meets the eye (more on this later).
And would you believe that most decisions are made primarily by emotions (80%) rather than the rational (only 20%)?
