Emotions in Shape Design of Household Electric Iron

Abstract

Understanding of the designer’s intent into eliciting emotions in shape preferences of consumers could offer much benefits in human product in-teraction. The study focused on identifying the stimulation of emotional pat-terns on shape design of household electric iron considering a set of six emo-tions: Satisfaction, Desire, Joy, Anger, Boredom and Fear. The study started with a broader collection of branded household electric iron categorizing into simple and complex in terms of handle and outer shell/cover design cross-sectional shapes. Selected participants were briefed about the task where repre-sented stimuli in each category was shown to report their emotional responses employing the PrEmo tool animations. An online survey was conducted to rec-ord the emotions experienced when presented with any of the represented stim-uli in three shape categories of iron. ANOVA has been performed to correlate simplicity and complexity of shape design of handle and outer shell/cover of electric iron with the aforementioned set of six emotions. The findings of this research allowed us to gain insights into how individuals perceive and emotion-ally respond to different designs based on their structural complexity. This re-search adds to the existing body of knowledge on emotional design by facilitat-ing a structured incorporation of emotional considerations into the physical de-sign of tangible products.