Unity enhances product aesthetics and emotion

Although the aesthetic properties of a product are likely associated with users' emotional responses, empirical evidence does not explain how the aesthetic properties of a product evoke an emotional response. This study presents the hypothesis that users' emotions are evoked when they observe an aesthetically pleasing product with unity. The results implied that a product form with more unity had a greater likelihood of affecting users' positive emotions compared with those with less unity, and that the unity aesthetic may act as a mediator in evoking emotion. In addition, the results confirmed that products composed of curvier elements tended to evoke a stronger pleasure response compared with those defined by straight lines. A systematic approach, namely the decision tree method, acts as a unity design guideline for the enhancement of product aesthetics, which may evoke users’ pleasure responses further.Relevance to industryOur findings imply that a product form with more unity had a greater likelihood of affecting users’ positive emotions compared with those with less unity. In addition, a systematic approach, namely the decision tree method, acts as a unity design guideline for the enhancement of product aesthetics, which may apply for designing products with pleasures.     

Product design,semantics and emotional response

This paper explores theoretical issues in ergonomics related to semantics and the emotional content of design. The aim is to find answers to the following questions: how to design products triggering ‘happiness’ in one's mind; which product attributes help in the communication of positive emotions; and finally, how to evoke such emotions through a product. In other words, this is an investigation of the ‘meaning’ that could be designed into a product in order to ‘communicate’ with the user at an emotional level. A literature survey of recent design trends, based on selected examples of product designs and semantic applications to design, including the results of recent design awards, was carried out in order to determine the common attributes of their design language. A review of Good Design Award winning products that are said to convey and/or evoke emotions in the users has been done in order to define good design criteria. These criteria have been discussed in relation to user emotional responses and a selection of these has been given as examples.     

Product design, semantics and emotional response

This paper explores theoretical issues in ergonomics related to semantics and the emotional content of design. The aim is to find answers to the following questions: how to design products triggering "happiness" in one's mind; which product attributes help in the communication of positive emotions; and finally, how to evoke such emotions through a product. In other words, this is an investigation of the "meaning" that could be designed into a product in order to "communicate" with the user at an emotional level. A literature survey of recent design trends, based on selected examples of product designs and semantic applications to design, including the results of recent design awards, was carried out in order to determine the common attributes of their design language. A review of Good Design Award winning products that are said to convey and/or evoke emotions in the users has been done in order to define good design criteria. These criteria have been discussed in relation to user emotional responses and a selection of these has been given as examples.     

A Multimodal Measurement Method of Users’ Emotional Experiences Shopping Online

Emotions play an important role in the design of e‐commerce websites. A website should satisfy its users’ emotional needs. Emotion measurement is a prerequisite to understanding users’ emotional needs; because emotions contain complicated components, they are difficulty to measure. To interpret users’ emotional experiences while the users are interacting with e‐commerce websites, we propose a multimodal measurement method conjoint using questionnaires, eye tracking, and physiological measures. The effects of various websites on users’ emotions and the relationship between users’ subjective emotional ratings, eye movements, and physiological responses, along with the effects of their emotions on behavior intentions, were analyzed. The results indicate that differences in users’ emotional experiences while shopping on various e‐commerce websites are primarily embodied in subjective emotional ratings and eye movements. There is a correlation between users’ subjective emotional ratings, eye movements, and physiological responses, and to some extent, users’ emotional experiences can affect their behavior intentions.     

A method for product form design of integrating interactive genetic algorithm with the interval hesitation time and user satisfaction

Due to the continuous release of new products, manufacturers are paying attention to customer-oriented design of products that meet user needs to minimize the risk of their products being rejected by the market. Due to the ambiguity of user cognition, it is difficult to accurately obtain the user's preference for individual productions. To respond to the challenge, we propose an engineering scientific research method of interactive genetic algorithm with the interval arithmetic based on hesitation and fuzzy kano model(FKM) to explore the emotional needs of users for product forms and drive product modeling evolution design. Through expert interviews, the morphological characteristics and perceptual images factors of the products attracting users are investigated. In order to identify the user's satisfaction relationship with the perceptual images, we use FKM to analyze the product image style that meets the user's kansei needs accurately and selects 5 factors which is attractive attributes. Meanwhile, we attempt to transform this 5 factors into evaluation carrier to guide the evolution direction of product styling in HIIF-IGA, and then optimized four electric bikes with scores over 8.8 so that it could realize user demand-driven product evolution design. To handle users' ambiguity, the FAHP method is used to quantify the user's emotional imagery criterion and create a product evolution design system platform, which can automatically generate product styling design scheme in line with user preferences. This experimental results show that the proposed method can help enterprises effectively improve customer satisfaction and reduce the cost and time of product development.     

The marketing implications of affective product design

Emotions are compelling human experiences and product designers can take advantage of this by conceptualizing emotion-engendering products that sell well in the market. This study hypothesized that product attributes influence users’ emotions and that the relationship is moderated by the adherence of these product attributes to purchase criteria. It was further hypothesized that the emotional experience of the user influences purchase intention. A laboratory study was conducted to validate the hypotheses using mobile phones as test products. Sixty-two participants were asked to assess eight phones from a display of 10 phones and indicate their emotional experiences after assessment. Results suggest that some product attributes can cause intense emotional experience. The attributes relate to the phone's dimensions and the relationship between these dimensions. The study validated the notion of integrating affect in designing products that convey users’ personalities.     

Using event-related potentials to identify user emotion caused by product color attribute

The accurate quantification of the correlation between product color attributes and user emotions is the key to product color emotional design (PCED). However, the traditional method of emotion quantification is subjective, one-sided, and contingent, which reduces the reliability of the research results. To this end, this paper proposes a method for PCED based on the quantification of electroencephalogram (EEG) physiological indicators. A medical product, namely an infant incubator, is used as the experimental stimulus samples, and “unsafe-safe” is used as the perceptual imager word pair to conduct EEG measurement experiments of the user's emotional state. Two types of data are obtained in the experiment, namely behavioral data and EEG data. Via the analysis of the two types of data, the EEG physiological characteristic indicators (the event-related potentials (ERPs) components) are obtained, which can explain the user’s emotional cognitive mechanism. Finally, the relationship between the user’s emotional state and EEG characteristics under the influence of product color attributes is explored. The conclusions are as follows. (1) The “safety” emotional value of the two-color samples is higher than that of the three-color samples, which indicates that the simpler the color matching, the higher the safety emotion attribute of the samples. (2) Via the study of the three attributes of hue, lightness, and chroma in the assistant colors of the two-color samples, it is found that when the hue attributes of the samples are red, cyan, and blue, the safety emotional value is higher; moreover, the higher the lightness attribute and the chroma attribute, the higher the safety emotion. Research on the two color attribute dimensions of hue harmony and color tone harmony between the auxiliary color of the three-color samples and the embellishment color revealed that the more consistent the hue harmony, the higher the safety emotion, and the more significant the difference in the color tone harmony, the higher the safety emotion. (3) The reaction time data in the behavioral data demonstrate that the participants had the longest average reaction time under neutral emotions. (4) The results of the time–frequency analysis of the EEG data reveal that there are apparent mid-to-early ERPs components between 100 and 300 ms after the appearance of the stimulus samples. The ERPs component analysis results show that the P1 component can reflect the emotional valence to a certain extent; the higher the amplitude of the P1 component, the more pronounced the negative emotions of the participants, and the lower the safety emotional evaluation value of the two-color samples, the higher the amplitude of the P1 component. Moreover, the N2 and P3 components can reflect the degree of emotional arousal to a certain extent, and the increase in their amplitude indicates the more substantial emotion of the participant; furthermore, the correlation between N2 and emotional arousal is higher. The two-color and three-color experiments revealed that the more neutral the emotional state, the lower the amplitudes of N2 and P3. This research is expected to provide a theoretical foundation and experimental data basis for PCED methods based on EEG physiological indicators.     

A product configuration analysis method for emotional design using a personal construct theory

Identifying emotion-related product attributes (perceived by consumers) is no easy task in the realm of emotional design. Conventionally, this process relies heavily on the researchers who conduct the Kansei experiments selecting product attributes such as color, form, and texture for Kansei studies. However, in so doing, other product attributes that also play a vital role in product-emotion associations might be neglected by the researchers. More importantly, the identification of product attributes should be based on consumer's point of view (and feelings). Accordingly, a personal construct theory based product configuration analysis method is proposed in this work. The method develops the customer's mind map for each Kansei tag in order to capture replications of candidate products. A means-value chain is used to generate targets which are later compared with candidate products by consumers. The comparison results could suggest product attributes that are relevant to the desired Kansei. The proposed approach is presented and illustrated using a case study of Graffiti designs on notebooks. Results obtained are discussed. It appears that the proposed method is promising in identifying product attributes with desired Kansei impacts.     

The impact of a computerized conferencing system on the productivity of scientific research communities

Researchers and practitioners in the field of information and communication technologies (ICT) have for a while been embracing the concepts of user and consumer experience as well as emotions in design, encouraging the industry to emphasise hedonic and symbolic qualities of products and services, over and beyond their utilitarian characteristics. However, the idea that mobile phone users, for instance, seek increasingly experience-rich, personalised products can not be taken for granted. Therefore, it is valuable to investigate the degree to which users really share designers' increasingly socio-emotional stances. The presented longitudinal study investigated users' mobile phone-related product meaning, particularly its development from 2004 to 2008. Product meaning was conceptualised in terms of an affective-cognizant choice mode dimension complemented by items capturing utilitarian, hedonic, and symbolic facets of the construct. The findings provide grounds for raising an important discussion about a possible pragmatic shift in product meaning, away from emotional and holistic, towards piecemeal and rational valuation. This would obviously challenge current design maxims. Linking these results to users' personality and mobile phone ownership history, subgroups with notably dissimilar product meaning development could be distinguished mainly with regard to levels of neuroticism, extraversion and brand loyalty – however, not gender.     

Unconscious emotions: quantifying and logging something we are not aware of

Lifelogging tools aim to precisely capture daily experiences of people from the first-person perspective. Although there have been numerous lifelogging tools developed for users to record the external environment around them, the internal part of experience characterized by emotions seems to be neglected in the lifelogging field. However, the internal experiences of people are important and, therefore, lifelogging tools should be able to capture not only the environmental data, but also emotional experiences, thereby providing a more complete archive of past events. Moreover, there are implicit emotions that cannot be consciously experienced, but still influence human behaviors and memories. It has been proven that conscious emotions can be recognized from physiological signals of the human body. This fact may be used to enhance life-logs with information about unconscious emotions, which otherwise would remain hidden. On the other hand, it is not clear if unconscious emotions can be recognized from physiological signals and differentiated from conscious emotions. Therefore, an experiment was designed to elicit emotions (both conscious and unconscious) with visual and auditory stimuli and to record cardiovascular responses of 34 participants. The experimental results showed that heart rate responses to the presentation of the stimuli are unique for every category of the emotional stimuli and allow differentiation between various emotional experiences of the participants.     

Exploiting multi-expression dependences for implicit multi-emotion video tagging

In this paper, a novel approach of implicit multiple emotional video tagging is proposed, which considers the relations between the users' facial expressions and emotions as well as the relations among multiple expressions. First, the audiences' expressions are inferred through a multi-expression recognition model, which consists of an image-driven expression measurement recognition and a Bayesian network representing the co-existence and mutual exclusion relations among multi-expressions. Second, the videos' multi-emotion tags are obtained from the recognized expressions by another Bayesian Network, capturing the relations between expressions and emotions. Results of the experiments conducted on the JAFFE and NVIE databases demonstrate that the performance of expression recognition is improved by considering the relations among multiple expressions. Furthermore, the relations between expressions and emotions help improve emotional tagging, as our approach outperforms the traditional expression-based or image-driven implicit tagging methods.     

Touch gestures in communicating emotional intention via vibrotactile stimulation

Remote communication between people typically relies on audio and vision although current mobile devices are increasingly based on detecting different touch gestures such as swiping. These gestures could be adapted to interpersonal communication by using tactile technology capable of producing touch stimulation to a user's hand. It has been suggested that such mediated social touch would allow for new forms of emotional communication. The aim was to study whether vibrotactile stimulation that imitates human touch can convey intended emotions from one person to another. For this purpose, devices were used that converted touch gestures of squeeze and finger touch to vibrotactile stimulation. When one user squeezed his device or touched it with finger(s), another user felt corresponding vibrotactile stimulation on her device via four vibrating actuators. In an experiment, participant dyads comprising a sender and receiver were to communicate variations in the affective dimensions of valence and arousal using the devices. The sender's task was to create stimulation that would convey unpleasant, pleasant, relaxed, or aroused emotional intention to the receiver. Both the sender and receiver rated the stimulation using scales for valence and arousal so that the match between sender's intended emotions and receiver's interpretations could be measured. The results showed that squeeze was better at communicating unpleasant and aroused emotional intention, while finger touch was better at communicating pleasant and relaxed emotional intention. The results can be used in developing technology that enables people to communicate via touch by choosing touch gesture that matches the desired emotion.     

Visual product evaluation: exploring users' emotional relationships with products

This paper discusses an industrial designer's approach to eliciting user perceptions and emotional responses to products through visual evaluation and stimuli. Whilst the authors accept that product functionality is crucial for product success, the appearance, use of materials, shape and form provide the most immediate product data for the user. Less tangible issues such as emotional bonding of users with products, cultural perceptions and social value systems, provide valuable insights for the product developer to help expand knowledge and understanding of the users' need beyond the functional. This paper presents product personality profiling as a new technique for design researchers/designers, and discusses it alongside other emerging approaches such as mood boards and visual product evaluation. The authors have used these techniques during focus group sessions with users to elicit individuals' needs and aspirations towards products. Such a user-centred approach is fundamental to applied ergonomics. Experiences, benefits, and limitations of these techniques are outlined as well as the opportunities for further development.     

人机交互中的智能体情感计算研究

机器的情感是通过融入具有情感能力的智能体实现的,虽然目前在人机交互领域已经有大量研究成果,但有关智能体情感计算方面的研究尚处起步阶段,深入开展这项研究对推动人机交互领域的发展具有重要的科学和应用价值。本文通过检索Scopus数据库选择有代表性的文献,重点关注情感在智能体和用户之间的双向流动,分别从智能体对用户的情绪感知和对用户情绪调节的角度开展分析总结。首先梳理了用户情绪的识别方法,即通过用户的表情、语音、姿态、生理信号和文本信息等多通道信息分析用户的情绪状态,归纳了情绪识别中的一些机器学习方法。其次从用户体验角度分析具有情绪表现力的智能体对用户的影响,总结了智能体的情绪生成和表现技术,指出智能体除了通过表情之外,还可以通过注视、姿态、头部运动和手势等非言语动作来表现情绪。并且梳理了典型的智能体情绪架构,举例说明了强化学习在智能体情绪设计中的作用。同时为了验证模型的准确性,比较了已有的情感评估手段和评价指标。最后指出智能体情感计算急需解决的问题。通过对现有研究的总结,智能体情感计算研究是一个很有前景的研究方向,希望本文能够为深入开展相关研究提供借鉴。     

Conceptual design of a user-centric smart product-service system using self-organizing map

As an emerging IT-driven business paradigm, smart product-service system (Smart PSS), which offers not only the smart, connected product (SCP) but also its generated service as a solution bundle, has become a vital research topic. Many research efforts have been devoted to constructing the conceptual design framework by considering SCPs and services simultaneously. However, the following critical issues in Smart PSS conceptual design have not been well addressed: how to improve the solution of Smart PSS in the conceptual design stage to meet user emotional requirements. Aiming to fill the gap, this work proposes a conceptual design method for Smart PSS from the perspective of analyzing user-generated emotions/feelings. Specifically, the relevant traditional products are identified, and their public review data is used to analyze user emotions/feelings in user-product interaction. Interactive emotion board as a new design tool is presented to organize the user-generated emotions/feelings, associated design elements, and the potential design points of the initial solution. And the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is utilized to evaluate the improved solution. To ensure the efficiency of the analysis process, the self-organizing map (SOM) algorithm is utilized in the process of clustering product samples and Kansei words. A case study of smart electric bicycle service system (SEBSS) design is used to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method. Based on the case study, the proposed approach appears effective in helping with Smart PSS conceptual design.     

Individual difference of artificial emotion applied to a service robot

In order to enable personalized natural interaction in service robots, artificial emotion is needed which helps robots to appear as individuals. In the emotion modeling theory of emotional Markov chain model (eMCM) for spontaneous transfer and emotional hidden Markov model (eHMM) for stimulated transfer, there are three problems: 1) Emotion distinguishing problem: whether adjusting parameters of the model have any effects on individual emotions; 2) How much effect the change makes; 3) The problem of different initial emotional states leading to different resultant emotions from a given stimuli. To solve these problems, a research method of individual emotional difference is proposed based on metric multidimensional scaling theory. Using a dissimilarity matrix, a scalar product matrix is calculated. Subsequently, an individual attribute reconstructing matrix can be obtained by principal component factor analysis. This can display individual emotion difference with low dimension. In addition, some mathematical proofs are carried out to explain experimental results. Synthesizing the results and proofs, corresponding conclusions are obtained. This new method provides guidance for the adjustment of parameters of emotion models in artificial emotion theory.     

Exploring Preservice Teachers’ Emotional Experiences in an Immersive Virtual Teaching Simulation through Facial Expression Recognition

This study investigated preservice teachers’ emotional experiences while interacting within a virtual scenario-based teacher-training system called Simulation for Teaching Enhancement of Authentic Classroom beHavior Emulator (SimTEACHER). We created three types of interactions (no interaction, unexpected interaction, and expected interaction) within SimTEACHER and examined the influences of the interaction design on preservice teachers’ emotional responses in three aspects: key performance indicators (attention, emotional engagement, and sentiment), emotional valence (positive, neutral, and negative), and four basic emotions (joy, sadness, fear, and anger). Fourteen preservice teachers from a 4-year public university in southwestern South Korea participated in this study. The data of the participants’ emotional expressions were collected using the Emotient software, which has been widely used for automated facial expression recognition and analysis. A series of one-way repeated-measured Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) indicated that participants experienced higher positive and neutral emotions, higher emotional engagement, and a higher feeling of joy when they engaged in unexpected interactions than when they engaged in expected interactions or no interactions.     

基于产品的情感体验探究

本文从认知心理学情感产生的原理入手,比较两种情感测量的途径,最后以一套可用的产品情感测试工具(the Product Emotion Measurement Instrument,简称为PrEmo)为案例进行分析,探究测量基于产品的情感体验的方法,帮助设计师针对不同的目标人群得到有效的产品评估结果。     

信息时代工业设计的新趋势

工业设计就是信息为主导的行业:设计师要分析现存事物和设备的状态然后设计出更为优越的产品。因而信息技术的革命对产品设计的过程带来了重大的影响,我们有必要对信息技术所取得的成就做出评估。此文将探讨这一新兴技术中的新潮流。信息技术所带来的新潮流包括:产品的情感要素的强化,人与产品和界面的情景交融中产生感情互动的趋势,艺术的创造方法成为产品创新和产品设计与互联网紧密结合。