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Don Norman’s “Emotional Design” Theory

Don Norman explains his Emotional Design Theory about how designers create the perfect products: knowing your emotions […]

Why do we choose to buy certain things over others? Did you ever wonder why cheap wine tastes better in fancy glasses? Why sales of Macintosh computers soared when Apple introduced the colorful iMac? New research on emotion and cognition has shown that attractive things really do work better, as Donald Norman amply demonstrates in this fascinating book, which has garnered acclaim everywhere from Scientific American to The New Yorker. Don Norman explains his Emotional Design Theory about how designers create the perfect products: knowing your emotions.

Emotional Design

About Don Norman

Don Norman is an anthropologist of modern life, studying the way we humans interact with our designed world. Though he has a slight reputation as a grumpy critic, he wants nothing less than to close the gap between products and their users. If you’ve ever fought with an automatic faucet in an airport bathroom, or wondered which button to press in the anonymous row on top of your printer, it’s good to know that Norman is in your corner. He’s the author of a raft of books on design and the way we humans interact with it, including the classic The Design of Everyday Things.

Norman began his career as an academic, working in psychology and then cognitive science at UCSD. In the mid-’90s, he joined Apple and ended up in their Advanced Technology Group. Later worked for HP, before returning to university life. He’s now the co-director of an innovative combined MBA and MEM program (called MMM) at Northwestern University. He’s also a cofounder of the usability consultancy Nielsen Norman Group.

via CNN

By Itamar Medeiros

Originally from Brazil, Itamar Medeiros currently lives in Germany, where he works as VP of Design Strategy at SAP and lecturer of Project Management for UX at the M.Sc. Usability Engineering at the Rhein-Waal University of Applied Sciences .

Working in the Information Technology industry since 1998, Itamar has helped truly global companies in multiple continents create great user experience through advocating Design and Innovation principles. During his 7 years in China, he promoted the User Experience Design discipline as User Experience Manager at Autodesk and Local Coordinator of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) in Shanghai.

Itamar holds a MA in Design Practice from Northumbria University (Newcastle, UK), for which he received a Distinction Award for his thesis Creating Innovative Design Software Solutions within Collaborative/Distributed Design Environments.

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