On the Relationship between Emotion, Experience and the Design of New Products

As people become more sensitive to dimensions of products that go beyond traditional aspects of usability, the need to understand emotion and experience and their implications for product design increases. This paper presents an approach to emotion and experience that is useful for designers. We present three prominent approaches to emotion and experience expressed by Dewey, a philosopher, Carlson, a cognitive scientist, and Csikszentmihalyi, a social scientist. We synthesize commonalities and differences in this work into a generative framework that is meant to help designers discover product opportunities to stimulate, enhance, or change emotional experience.