Engaged in emotional design
An EU-funded project is collecting and evaluating tools to capture the emotional needs of consumers and incorporate them into the design process, serving as a bridge between user, design and manufacture. Innovation is costly and the failure rate of new products is high, with 40 percent failing in the marketplace. Although functionality has always been, and will remain, an essential precondition for product satisfaction and market success, various developments point to the increasing importance of product experience as a driving force of acquisition and use. The concept of 'quality' has moved beyond functionality and usability to include the fulfilment of people's subjective and emotional lifestyle needs. As a result, the bottleneck in introducing new and successful products to the market has moved from factory floor manufacturing to the product specification, design and evaluation process. Knowledge-based changes in the conception of products are now seen as being critical to maintain and increase EU competitiveness. Many industries and research disciplines, such as consumer sciences, psychology, ergonomics, industrial design, engineering, are responding to this need, but further efforts are still required. A holistic procedure combining vertical (disciplines) and horizontal (products/services) approaches is lacking, and methods for capturing the emotional needs of consumers and incorporating them into the design process need to be developed and standardised. To achieve this, the ENGAGE consortium is creating a knowledge community by gathering best practices in emotional engineering and then communicating their impact on market success. The project, a coordination action funded by the 'information society technologies' (IST) priority of the European Sixth Framework Programme, gathers 21 research centres and industrial partners, including small businesses, from 9 European countries. The main aim of the project is to establish appropriate communication and collaboration between researchers and practitioners in this area, which has so far been scarce. ENGAGE also works to document and validate the methods used in local success so they can be applied in other scenarios. A further aspect of the project focuses on providing guidance to industry on which of the emerging, competing methods is, most appropriate for their circumstances. Finally, the project also incorporates early user feedback into the knowledge-based design process, something that is often poorly defined and arrives too late in existing design processes.