Physical Movement and its Use as a Design Element in Enhancing the Emotional Value of A Product

Park Sun Young

Emotional interaction is important factor in increasing user satisfaction in product design. People often create emotional attachments with the products they use. By providing emotionally rich interaction, the products can be more closely associated with the users and support better user experience. In human-to-human interaction, emotional interaction can be provided by sharing mutual emotion through such things as facial expressions, voice intonation, and gestures. Such expressions are not provided when people interact with products. it is therefore, important to provide a means to express emotion in the product side. One of the ways to enhance emotional interaction is to use dynamic attributes as a way of expressing functional or emotional states of products. The physical movement is a particular one among the dynamic attributes. We investigated physical movements as means of expressing functional and emotional states of interactive products.