“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%)?
Comments
3 Comments so far. Comments are closed.Interestingly, I also attended a talk that dealt with emotion and metrics. It was from the folks at TU Delft. It was interesting because they used a little animation of a guy expressing a range of emotions, and had people pick which ones they were most aligned with in regards to a particular product. Then they could map it out and say “this product evokes more positive emotions, so we should go with this one.”
I think that’s what people are getting at with measuring emotions, they want to be able to prove scientifically that a certain design is better than another. Of course we both know there are a lot of problems with that.
At the same time, I think that it can be valuable to have some of the information available–I think designers need as much input or insight into a problem as they can get their hands on, and it’s up to them to judge whether to use it to build their argument or not. The danger comes when people rely purely on way of interpreting what emotion is or how to use it.
Anyway, I’d like to hear more about the different ways Dick talked about emotion and reason, as most of what I have learned regarding concepts of emotion were related to Psychology (ie, James), and I’m curious how that fits into the other concepts.
just to help build your bibliography on this, i think buddhism has a lot to say about emotion and awareness. vipassana meditation, something i try to do, is just the act of being aware, and developing that state. also, i think most buddists would say that you perceive a stimulus, then you have a bodily reaction (adrenaline pumping, etc) and then those bodily responses cause mental responses. to them its all about cause and effect, and by being aware of your own awareness, you can possibly see the whole process from start to finish and decide wether or not you want to experience the emotion on the horizon.
Great comments, guys. Imran, let me put up the high level cross of pain for Dick’s class in my next post.