CHI2003: Don Norman finds Emotion and ends Conference

'I bring a new me,' said Don Norman as he closed CHI2003. 'The old me was critical: always finding fault. My new life is emotional and always saying nice things.' With this wry observation, the old advocate of research into cognition and human performance joined the growing numbers of researchers and practitioners who, as he added, know that 'making something useful is only a small part of life'.

Describing the mini-cooper car as 'cute' and holding up a whole series of Alessi products to our gaze, the great populariser (the man who brought us Gibson's affordances, and Clayton Christensen's business theories) allowed that aesthetics and pleasure were an important part of design, saying that the role of emotion as an information processing system works in tandem with our logical systems.

He divided emotional responses into three: the visceral, when something is found attractive at the biological level; behavioural, as in how it feels to the body; and reflective. To illustrate the last of these he talked about a rollercoaster: to quell the reflective voice, it must look clean and safe.

He said that he hadn't got to grips with integrating humour into his model yet, though he was interested in fun. And he pointed to the false distinction made between emotion, mood and personality, suggesting there were no lines to be drawn in designing better products.

So, he may not be the first to have woken up to the complexity that is human experience (see, for instance, the University of York's work on Computers and Fun) but it's good to have someone of his weight on board.

Norman, with the Nielsen Norman Group, will be presenting his first-ever full-day tutorial on what interaction designers can learn from everyday things at User Experience 2003 in London in October (see the UN event listing here).

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