Emotional Design (15 page)

“Ping Pong Plus.” Images of water and a school of fish are projected onto the surface of the ping pong table. Each time the ball hits the table, the computer senses its position, causing the images of ripples to spread out from the ball and the fish to scatter.

Fun and pleasure, alas, are not topics often covered by science. Science can be too serious, and even when it attempts to examine the issues surrounding fun and pleasure, its very seriousness becomes a distraction. Yes, there are conferences on the scientific basis of humor, of fun (“funology” is the name given to this particular endeavor), but this is a difficult topic and progress is slow. Fun is still an art form, best left to the creative minds of writers, directors, and other artists. But the lack of scientific understanding should not get in the way of our enjoyment. Artists often pave the way, exploring
approaches to human interaction that science then struggles to understand. This has long been true in drama, literature, art, and music, and it is these areas that provide lessons for design. Fun and games: a worthwhile pursuit.

Why must information be presented in a dull, dreary fashion, such as in a table of numbers? Most of the time we don't need actual numbers, just some indication of whether the trend is up or down, fast or slow, or some rough estimate of the value. So why not display the information in a colorful manner, continually available in the periphery of attention, but in a way that delights rather than distracts? Once again, Professor Ishii suggests the means: Imagine colorful pinwheels spinning above your head, enjoyable to contemplate, but where the rate of spin is meaningful, perhaps coupled to the outside temperature, or maybe volume of traffic on the roads you use for your daily commute, or for any statistic that is useful to watch. Do you need to be reminded to do something at a specific time? Why not have the pinwheels increase their speed as the time approaches, the higher rate of speed being more likely to attract your attention and, simultaneously, to indicate the urgency. Spinning pinwheels? Why not? Why not have information displayed in a pleasant, comfortable way?

Technology should bring more to our lives than the improved performance of tasks: it should add richness and enjoyment. A good way to bring fun and enjoyment to our lives is to trust in the skill of artists. Fortunately, there are many around.

Consider the pleasure of the Japanese lunchbox, which started as a simple work lunch. In the box lunch you can enjoy a wide assortment of foods, wide enough so that even if you do not like some of the entrées, there are other choices. The box is small, yet fully packed, which poses an aesthetic challenge to the chef. In the best of cases
(
figure 4.2
), the result is a work of art: art meant to be consumed. The Japanese industrial designer Kanji Ekuan has suggested that the aesthetics of the Japanese lunchbox is an excellent metaphor for design. This lunchbox, divided into small compartments, each with five or six types of food, packs twenty to twenty-five colors and flavors within its small space. Ekuan describes it this way:

The book illustrates how design should incorporate depth, beauty, and utility. Ekuan demonstrates that the lunchbox is a metaphor for much of Japanese design philosophy. It is art meant to be consumed. It follows the philosophy more is better, offering an assortment of foods so that everyone can find something to their taste. It originated as a practical, working person's lunch, so it combines function, practicality, and beauty—as well as an exercise in philosophy.

The crowded nature of the lunchbox has many virtues. It forces attention to detail in the arrangement and presentation of the food. This essence of design, packing a lot into a small space while maintaining an aesthetic sense, says Ekuan, is the essence of much of Japan's design for high technology, where one goal is “to establish multifunctionality and miniaturization as equal values. Packing numerous functions into something and making it smaller and thinner are contradictory aims, but one had to pursue contradiction to the limit to find a solution.”

The trick is to compress multiple functions into limited space in a way that does not compromise the various dimensions of design. Ekuan clearly prizes beauty—aesthetics—first. “A sense of beauty that lauds lightness and simplicity,” he continues, “desire that precipitates functionality, comfort, luxury, diversity. Fulfillment of beauty and its concomitant desire will be the aim of design in the future.”

Beauty, fun, and pleasure all work together to produce enjoyment, a state of positive affect. Most scientific studies of emotion have focused upon the negative side, upon anxiety, fear, and anger, even though fun, joy, and pleasure are the desired attributes of life. The climate is changing, with articles and books on “positive psychology” and “well-being” becoming popular. Positive emotions trigger many benefits: They facilitate coping with stress. They are essential to people's curiosity and ability to learn. Here is how the psychologists Barbara Fredrickson and Thomas Joiner describe positive emotions:

It doesn't take much to transform otherwise dull data into a bit of fun. Contrast the style of three major internet search companies. Google stretches out its logo to fit the number of results in a playful, jolly way (
figure 4.3
). Several people have told me how much they look forward to seeing just how long the
Gooooogle
will get. But Yahoo, Microsoft network (MSN), and many other sites forgo any notion of fun, and instead present the straightforward results in an unimaginative, orderly way. Small point? Yes, but a meaningful one. Google is known as a playful, fun site—as well as a very useful one—and this playful distortion of its logo helps reinforce this brand image: Fun for the user of the site, good reflective design, and good for business.

The academic, research enterprise of design has not done a good job of studying fun and pleasure. Design is usually thought of as a practical skill, a profession rather than a discipline. In my research for this book, I found lots of literature on behavioral design, much discussion of aesthetics, image, and advertising. The book
Emotional
Branding
is a treatment of advertising, for example. Academics have concentrated primarily upon the history of design, or the social history or societal implications, or if they are from the cognitive and computer sciences, upon the study of machine interfaces and usability.

Some searches return multiple pages, so Google modifies its logo accordingly: When I performed a search on the phrase “emotion and accordingly: When I performed a search on the phrase ”emotion and design” I got 10 pages of results. Google stretched its logo to put 10 “Os” in its name, providing some fun while also being informative and, best of all, non-intrusive.
(Courtesy of Google.)

In
Designing Pleasurable Products,
one of the few scientific studies of pleasure and design, the human factors expert and designer Patrick Jordan builds on the work of Lionel Tiger to identify four kinds of pleasure. Here is my interpretation:

Take the Jordan/Tiger classification, mix with equal parts of the three design levels, and you have a fun and pleasurable end result. But fun and pleasure are elusive concepts. Thus, what is considered delightful depends a lot upon the context. The actions of a kitten or human baby may be judged fun and cute, but the very same actions performed by a cat or human adult can be judged irritating or disgusting. Moreover, what is fun at first can outwear its welcome.

Consider the “Te ò” tea strainer (
figure 4.4
), designed by Stefano Pirovano for the Italian manufacturing firm Alessi. At first glance it is cute, childish even. As such, it doesn't qualify as fun—not yet. It is a simple animate figure. The day I purchased it, I had lunch with Keiichi Sato, a professor of design at the Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Design in Chicago. At the lunch table, I proudly displayed my new purchase. Sato's first response was skeptical. “Yes,” he said, “it's pleasant and cute, but to what purpose?” But when I placed the strainer on a cup, his eyes lit up, and he laughed (see
figure 4.5
).

At first sight, the arms and legs of the figure are simply cute, but when it becomes apparent that the cuteness is also functional, then “cute” becomes transformed into “pleasure” and “fun,” and this, moreover, is long-lasting. Sato and I spent much of the next hour trying to understand what transforms an impression of shallow cuteness into one of deep, long-lasting pleasure. In the case of the
Te ò
strainer, the unexpected transformation is the key. Both of us noted that the essence of the surprise was the separation between the two viewings: first the tea strainer alone, then on the teacup. “If you publish this in your book,” Sato warned me, “make sure that you have only the picture of the strainer visible on one page, and make the reader turn the page to see the strainer on a teacup. If you don't do that, the surprise—and the fun—will not be as strong.” As you see, I have followed that advice.