Product sounds: Basic concepts and categories

In this paper we investigated which categories of product sounds listeners can distinguish. We explored the perceptual domain of product sounds in order to be able to derive perceptually similar categories and determine how users are able to describe these categories by merely listening to them. Employing two different experimental paradigms ...

The Harley effect: Internal and external factors that facilitate positive experiences with product sounds

Everyday activities are laden with emotional experiences involving sound. Our interactions with products (shavers, hairdryers, electric drills) often cause sounds that are typically unpleasant to the ear. Yet, we may get excited with the sound of an accelerating Harley Davidson because the rumbling sound represents adventure or an espresso...

Capturing conflict experiences: Five methods for identifying intra-personal concern conflicts

This paper starts from the proposition that concern conflicts can be powerful starting points for user-centered design processes. Our focus is on the challenge to identify conflicting concerns that are both inspiring and relevant in the context of use, or in the user’s general context of life. First, three main ingredients of concern conflict...

Language of conflicts: An introduction to using concern conflicts as a design opportunity

This workshop is based on the proposition that concern conflicts can be powerful starting points for user-centered design processes. Concern conflicts arise when the user wants to simultaneously fulfill two concerns that require mutually exclusive choice alternatives. Imagine your alarm clock ringing in the morning. You need to attend an early...

Beyond metaphor in product use and interaction

The overall aim of this paper is to demonstrate that there is a need for supplementing the theory of product metaphor with a more elaborate theory of product meaning. More speci!cally, we argue that the notion of product metaphor neglects three critically important aspects of meaning making in product use. First, the notion of product metaphor...

Product metaphor generation: Mapping strategies of designers

When generating product metaphors, designers select an entity to associate with the product they intend to design and transfer certain feature(s) of this entity to the product. This transfer, called mapping, can be realized by following different strategies (e.g. implicit-literal, explicit-literal, implicitabstract and explicit-abstract. In this...