Emotional design: the development of a process to envision emotion-centric new product ideas

There is ample evidence, in many sectors, of the crucial importance of the emotional experiences in the interaction between users and products. Generating products with richer and significant emotional features is a complex challenge. In order to better face this challenge, professionals responsible for designing and developing new products could be facilitated with techniques and tools to understand emotions and to convey specific emotions in the new products. This paper presents the development of a process to support product design teams to envision emotion-focused new product ideas - Emotion-Driven Innovation (E-DI). We have adopted the process research methodology proposed by Platts, which encompasses four main steps: 1) state-of-the-art review, 2) process creation, 3) process development, and 4) process validation. This paper presents the results of the three first steps. The state-of-the-art literature review has been the foundation of the process creation step, which resulted in a three-phase workshop-based process: Emotion Knowledge Acquisition, Emotion Goal Definition, and Idea Generation. In the third step of the research methodology, the feasibility, usability, and utility have been tested through four studies which have involved master design students from Portugal and Italy. The results of these four tests show that Emotion-Driven Innovation process supports designers 1) to identify the occurrence of emotions in certain category of products present in the market, 2) to apply this information to make strategic decisions when defining the emotional intentions for the new product, and 3) to focus their creative thinking to develop strong and meaningful emotion-centric ideas.