>Don Norman on 3 ways good design makes you happy | Video on TED.com
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Don Norman is a well known design critic and author on the subject of design. I've enjoyed reading his work before. His thoughts on design and emotion makes sense and I can agree with what he says wholeheartedly. The environment and objects in the environment effect us emotionally and it does a feedback loop and in turn effects the usability for us the users.
In one of his books(I can't remember what one) he brings up a study that a Japanese University did about usability and design with atms. One set of ATMs had a UI that was designed and the other set was undesigned. And weirdly enough the designed ones worked better even though they were both running the same system. So when the university released it's results and Israeli school though this can be and conducted the same experiment in Israel thinking that the more practical Israelis would find no difference and the researchers were shocked to have repeated the Japanese results.
Happiness and our relation to the way things are designed are stronger than most would think or want to admit but they are there and the link should be respected. These are more examples of the visceral, but behavioral relates to our physical interactions. Integration of behavioral elements into design improves our emotional connections with the objects. Our reflective elements is usually the key motivation in most forms of design though. We often design to evoke a desire of the possible market. But I would wonder if it would be better if we ignore the last and focus on the visceral and behavioral elements our designs evoke?