"Some people think it's best to reason with a cool head," said Damasio, professor of neurology at the University of Iowa. "Others think they should always follow their feelings. The truth is that emotion is part of the mechanism of reasoning. The lack of it is very detrimental to decision making."
In other words, emotional design can provide that unknowable something that beckons a person to buy.
Designers such as Arie know that and deploy a variety of methods to persuade consumers to form emotional attachments to their products. They select materials and colors that please the eye, engineer sounds that strike the right emotional chords and mold shapes that invite touch.
Sony's Liv radio, for example, is designed to appeal to women; the curvy surface is reminiscent of a clutch purse. Liv's emotional opposite is Sony's WAT System, a slick black metallic boombox with speakers molded to look like a jet engine's afterburners.
At their core, the two radios have similar functions. But their emotional appeals are vastly different, said Justin Jakobson, a Sony designer. "The Liv radio is simple, honest and inviting," he said. "The boombox is pure aggression. It's loud and scary."
Part of the objective of emotional design is to repackage mature technology, such as a radio, in ways that make people want to own it. One way to do that is by using novel materials.
Many of today's products are so mass-produced that they retain little character, said Paul Bradley, a designer at Ideo. "Products today are made from polycarbonates that look their best the day you take them off the shelf," Bradley said. "After that, they start to deteriorate. They flake, scratch, become dull."
To counter that, Bradley draws inspiration from musical instruments.
"They have a timelessness to them," he said. "And they have this handcrafted nature that invites human touch. They invite you to engage and develop an attachment to them."
For Hewlett-Packard Co., Bradley designed the look for a hand-held digital music mixer that lets users wirelessly control the music on their iPods. He chose a polished, nickel-plated exterior that curves around a user's hand, like a trumpet, and includes a dark wood logo.
"Inside, it's digital technology," Bradley said. "But we made it feel like an instrument that's handcrafted and detailed. If it were made of plastic, it wouldn't work. It would be a different object with different characteristics."
