Colloquia

Summary

How often are you inclined to leave a positive review on a product compared to a negative one? The ultimate goal of the project is to answer the question “What makes a product frustrating (most often)?” and to provide designers an illustrative and informative peek into the human mind and an understanding of frustration to better know how to avoid it for future designs; making good-design common place within our society.

 We have reached a point within society in which a complaint or negative review is far more common than the opposite. This provides an interesting approach to research product related emotions and how these affect human-product relationships. Through focusing on negative emotions and frustration in particular a deeper understanding of the human psyche can be reached. Based on Peter Desmet’s “Nine Sources of Emotion” and its product-evoked emotion matrix a methodological approach is created with which to compare and contrast the research.

This project used online negative reviews that users had left on products they were not satisfied with as an initial approach to provide a foundational understanding of emotion. Accompanied by other user-centred research methodologies to fill in gaps in the findings a deep analysis was possible. The project involved designing a purposefully frustrating product to demonstrate the researched findings and give validity. Further investigation was done through the designing process that provided an understanding on how frustration can be applied to products. The result of this design phase was a sex toy that has frustration bleed into each of its features, giving the research a well-rounded conclusion and giving the project a humorous twist.