How People’s Appreciation of Products Is Affected by Their Knowledge of the Designers’ Intentions

Products result from processes that are guided by designers’ intentions for what the products should be, what they should be like and what they should do. People might infer these intentions more or less accurately from the products’ form, or they might learn about them from a variety of sources such as advertisements and other marketing...

Physical pain in user-product interaction

The main focus of the multidisciplinary nature of design is to provide users a better life in terms of enabling the products to be safe, usable and pleasurable to use. Therefore, physical pain is always avoided. However, physical pain is involved in our daily lives, not only as an avoided concept, but also as a constructive concept. It is used...

Sensory Dominance in Product Experience

People perceive the material world around them with their five senses. Information from different sensory modalities is integrated in the brain to create a stable and meaningful experience of objects, including industrial products that accompany us in our everyday life. Some of the sensory systems play a more important role in product experience...

Improving the user experience of nasoenteral tube feeding

This graduation project originates from a discomfort of a patient who couldn’t obtain common food in a natural way due to an obstruction in the digestive tract. Therefore, the patient needed tube feeding, which had to be administered into the digestive tract using a nasoenteral feeding tube. Despite the importance of the tube, the user...

Communicating "Homemade Cooking" through a new kitchen product.

This master thesis researched Homemade Cooking and how to communicate this experience through the sensory modalities. In order to find what the qualities of Homemade Cooking were and what kind of product would be interesting to develop three studies were carried out during this eight month thesis project: a contextmapping study (qualitative), a...

Should Mary smell like biscuit? Investigation scents in product design

In attempt to influence how a product is experienced, designers can manipulate all aspects of a product, including odor. The effect odor has on a consumer’s experience of the product is still not yet understood. Two experiments were conducted in order to shed more light on the influence odor has on consumers. In Experiment 1, differences in...

Consumer-product attachment: Measurement and design implications

Due to differences in the attachment consumers experience towards the durable products they own, they hang on to certain products whereas they easily dispose of others. From the viewpoint of sustainability, it may be worthwhile to lengthen the life span of many durable consumer products. Hence, there is a challenge for designers to strengthen...

Product sounds: Fundamentals and application

Products are ubiquitous, so are the sounds emitted by products. Product sounds influence our reasoning, emotional state, purchase decisions, preference, and expectations regarding the product and the product's performance. Thus, auditory experience elicited by product sounds may not be just about the act of hearing or a sensory response to an...

The effects of sensory impairments on product experience and personal well-being

To determine the roles the sensory modalities play in user-product interactions, one modality was blocked during the execution of eight simple tasks. Participants reported how they experienced the products and how they felt during the experiment. Blocking vision resulted in the largest loss of functional information, increased task difficulty...