Product Attachment and Pleasure; A Modus Operandi for Sustainability

Emotions are important parts of human lives as they influence the way people make decisions and behave. If users experience a pleasurable relationship with products, it results in user’s satisfaction and resultantly, and sustainable behavior will occur as users would not have the motivation to replace the existing product with a new one. This paper examines if designers can create some sort of proper attachment between users and products, they would tend to use the products to the extent the functionality can be maintained: a situation, considered to be some petite modus operandi for users’ sustainable behavior. This situation is more expected if users find the product pleasurable as well. To investigate, online and paper questionnaires were administered, using 153 respondents. Results revealed that the most pleasurable products are of digital and electronic nature, and mostly for their utilitarian aspects. Fashion, accessories, and embellishment items as well as most clothes are amongst the least attached (pleasurable) items, reported by the respondents.