Design from body to product movement for affective user experience

Abstract

This study aims at making product movements provide affective experiences for users, by realizing visions of ordinary products coming to life. Humans have a powerful sense to perceive and interpret others’ movements. Based on the experiences of bodily communications, people tend to associate objects’ movements with human characteristics, such as intentions and emotions. The human tendency of anthropomorphic sense-making inspired this research to apply cues of human body languages to product movement design. Such an approach was explored to strengthen original functions of daily products, and to overcome a communicational gap between users and products, in order to provide affective User Experiences (UX) with the products.

Designing embodied movements of products is a new challenge within industrial design. Movements of traditional products are mainly designed for instrumental reasons, rather than for communication purposes. Thanks to an affective UX paradigm and technological developments in embodied computing, the time is ripe to explore the emotional aspects of product movements. In this sense, studies in Human-Computer and Human-Robot Interaction have suggested new artifacts that make interesting movements. Nevertheless, these studies cannot provide generalized knowledge for product designers to practically understand and apply movement design to daily products.

To build systematic knowledge for affective movement design of products, this research went through the following five phases of (1) understanding humans’ tendency to perceive and use movements in non-verbal communication; (2) clarifying possible values, dimensions, and approaches of product movement design; (3) proposing a method for movement design of products based on the human body; (4) measuring UX in everyday life situations with moving products; (5) constructing a framework of product movement design for affective UX.

In the first phase, potential benefits of product movement design were e...