Emotional Mapping is a design process that uncovers
feelings and attitudes towards products. It gathers information on why
people prefer one product over the other. It identifies key attributes,
tangible and intangible, overt and subtle, conscious and subconscious,
that help connect products and people. This insight can focus a design
team’s creativity, add clout to the creative process, and result in
more innovative, radical and successful ideas.
Interesting article from Business Week.
The article describes a love-and-hate, black/white relationship when uncovering and mapping different emotions. At first sight it seems right to use a survey when gathering the information, but one thing strikes me – How can a design-team design the feeling of tomorrow? The NEW emotion? Possible? Or is it a “only” best guess?
One comment so far
Articles on how to actually “do emotional design” are hard to come by, so I appreciated this one. Formosa does point out that the method described can reveal love-hate relationships but that it isn’t the only or necessarily the most important use of this method.
I think it’s useful that the method provides a “map” and how it can change over time, and how it can be used to identify important attributes and their correlations.
As Formosa points out, new concepts based on insights gained from using this method would then be evaluated - so I don’t see it as an issue of “designing a feeling or emotion”…