Overall, the Emotional Design (ED) places the same underlying emphasis on importance of design usability. However, ED assess the subject from a completely different perspective than Design of Everyday Things (DOET), namely emotion. Norman seems to have literally stumbled on an unintuitive conclusion that aesthetics effects the ease with which people interact with new designs. This is a key difference from DOET due to the fact that DOET simply analyzes the function-ability of a design and downplays or even ignores aesthetics.
To begin in ED, Norman notes that happiness can facilitate creative thinking while negative emotions can cause the human to enter a flight or fight mental stage. This alone has huge implications on the design process. For instance, designs that simple to use in the initial stages create happiness of success and engage the user in a circular cycle of feeling more creative and tolerating minor nuances at later stages of the design usage. Whereas a frustrated user in the initial stage of using a new design will be rather automated in similar responses and refuse to engender a new approach to solving their problem. Thus, the designer should create a positive mood on it's users whether it be simple directions, interface, and even a comedy clip to ensure proper usage at a later component of the design object. The iPhone is a great example because the home screen is simple to use and creates a sense of curiosity that the user carries with them as they delve into new and intriguing applications. In contrast to DOET, Norman doesn't indicate any connection with user mood and the usage of the device. Thus, he uses ED to elaborate on some of his ideas in DOET in further depth through the inclusion of emotions.
In ED, Norman then delves into visceral, behavioral, and reflective types of thinking. In analyzing the way people think, Norman begins touching on very interesting psychological topics such as the fact that as the human becomes more stressed, they begin to become more focused and less creative. Thus, Norman divides his designs into categories of fun and serious. He notes that driving a BMW is fun, so the user tends to look over minor flaws whereas power plant emergency systems should induce a state of stress to create a more focused individual. At this point, ED begins to diverge from DOET in the methodology that ED is analyzing the current situation in which a device would be used. I think this is critical to keep in mind for specific designs, but the average everyday item will require personal usage in many environments that have ranging human emotion. I will briefly mention that Norman did discuss this in depth in ED for an introductory chapter, but his mention that sound is a simple and useful technique to induce the proper mood on people was extremely enlightening and interesting.
As Norman concludes his first chapter of ED, he finally unleashed his annoying side that was present in DOET. In discussing visceral traits of humans, he identifies that it is a pattern recognizing mechanism used to help decode many sensory images and even languages. He divulges on a relative escapade in bringing up abundant facts about how people learn languages, but fails to connect this to how a designer would incorporate it in the design process. This reminded me of his section about memory in DOET in which he provided some interesting points, but never mentioned how to apply how humans function. Lastly, Norman finishes up the first chapter of ED with the fact that the design process is immensely difficult. He notes that some people make like a design the first time, but not the second, or vice-versa, or based upon any kind of emotional infringement. In essence, he properly notes that designing a new device is extremely challenging as he did a plethora of times in DOET, but fails to provide any kind of guidance whatsoever.
In conclusion, I felt that the style of ED and DOET was extremely similar in regards to the fact that Norman brings up some fascinating topics, notes that they can be important in the design process, but does not provide any tangible examples. However, I felt that ED was intended to be an extension of DOET in the fact that it builds upon DOET by incorporating one more aspect that designers must consider, emotion. Although Norman did not mention emotion in DOET, it is probably the most influential matter in the utilization of a device. Norman most likely dissects the emotional impact in the design process which I would very much like to read in the near future.
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