Form, Function AND Emotion = Design

Whether you love it or hate it there is one thing that conceptual design/ experimental design/ art design or whatever else you want to call it does well, it makes people think and talk. You will never see someone talking about a Martha Stewart bowl from K Mart the same way someone talks about a Hella Jongerius vase, and there's a reason for that. The Martha Stewart bowl is just your generic bowl with some random decoration on it. It's a bowl. It works. It's painfully familiar because you've seen it a thousand time before with someone else's name on it. There is no thought in it other than "how can we make 100,000 bowls for middle-aged house wives at $14.99 a piece". The Jongerius vase on the other hand is different and unique. It has ideas behind it's already beautiful form that makes it that much more beautiful. The ideas in the Jongerius vase are human ideas, not economic ideas. Ideas about individuality, culture, process and story. It is human ideas that engage us in a dialogue with the products that we buy and live with, not price points. In addition to making a product look good and work well, designers and business people need to realize the value that can be added to a product by considering the ideas behind it and how it engages the user on an emotional level.

Why should we care about creating dialogue between people and their products? Because just like people relationships with products are created over time through a shared dialogue. With people this dialogue takes the form of conversation and shared experience. With products this dialogue is created by using the product over time and connecting with the look feel, culture, stories and ideas of the product. So really no matter the product a dialogue is going to occur between it and the user but it is the designers job to embed enough interesting layers into the product in order to create a strong dialogue that creates a deeper, more meaningful relationship. This idea can be compared again to our relationships with people. Who do you connect with on a deeper level? Your average Joe that goes day by day doing the same ordinary things and never really has anything interesting to say or thoughts on just about anything. Or someone who likes to try new things and has unique thoughts and opinions, some you don't always agree with, but you respect him for looking at things beyond the surface. Hopefully you would connect with the person that has more to offer. More layers of thought and personality. This is exactly the same for products. You connect with the ones that have more to offer, the ones that satisfy you functional, stylistic, and emotional needs. Now since we do live in a consumerist culture where almost all products are driven by price I will appeal to the business of design. People long to own and experience things that are unique or at least perceived to be unique. They are sick of the mundane functionalist crap that all looks that same and does not excite them. It comes down to basic business theory. If your product can satisfy more of the user's needs then it is going to be better than your competitor's and you are going to sell more product and make more money. Designers need to remember that emotional needs are needs that must be addressed in a product.

Now I'm not saying that every product out there should have a paragraph that comes with the product explaining how and where it was made. Nor a paragraph explaining how you new mixer engages you with the process of making bread dough. I just believe that designers should recognize the emotional value of the materials and processes they choose, as well as the culteral signifigance of the product, and try to design the product in a way that brings that emotion out for the user to connect with. If we as designers can start doing this on a larger scale then we will be creating objects for the masses that the masses will want to keep and not just throw away in a year.