EMOTIONS, SATISFACTION AND WELL-BEING THROUGH PRODUCT DESIGN

Product design is undoubtedly an important predictor of consumer behavior and plays a critical role for company success. Even though the field of consumer research has demonstrated that design affects a multitude of consumer responses, previous studies predominantly focus on how product design affects consumer behavior at the point of purchase, thus by simply visually perceiving the product. On the contrary, previous research in industrial design has focused on consumers emotional experience when interacting with products, but neglecting possible managerially relevant downstream consequences, such as consumer purchase intention. In this project, we will merge knowledge from the scientific disciplines of design and ergonomics, consumer/marketing research and applied psychology and in order to theoretically elaborate and empirically test how emotions are elicited by product design and in turn influence both consumer behavior and company success. Specifically, we will examine how product design affects specific unconscious and conscious emotions in user-product interaction, how these emotions elicited in user-product interaction influence design performance outcomes over a longitudinal period of time, and how product design affects product sales through specific emotions. Thus, this project aims at answering the following research questions: 1) How does the perception of design dimensions and its impact on emotions and design performance outcomes change in the course of product-user interaction (i.e., from pure visual perception to product use)? 2) Does the influence of unconscious and conscious emotions vary for low versus high involvement products? These research questions are addressed by longitudinal product tests with survey design studies, and longitudinal product tests with customer and sales data from our company partners (Studio F. A. Porsche/Porsche Design GmbH and Zanier Sport GmbH). Consumers unconscious emotions are measured by using the Emotional Facial Action Coding System (EmFACS), an innovative method to objectively identify ones emotions based on muscular, facial activity. Our project will be one of the first to systematically investigate the relationship between product design, emotions, and design performance from both a consumer research and industrial design perspective. Together, these results will contribute to the fields of design, psychology and consumer/marketing research and will spur theory development across formerly disconnected research disciplines.