Designing Engaging Interactions with Digital Products

This thesis aims to investigate how the experience of engagement in interaction can be explained by examining the experiences of richness and control and how these experiences are influenced by the features of a product, the expertise of a person and the type of task. This research is carried out within the domain of digital products. From the...

The commoditization of consumer electronics products and its influence on packaging design

The traditional purpose of packaging for consumer electronics (CE) products was to get them in one piece from the factory to the consumers home. It was purely focused on the physical distribution. In that time, buying a CE product could be considered a major family investment. However, times have changed, as nowadays a trend of commoditization...

Sensory incongruity and surprise in product design

People continuously experience the world and the objects in it through all their senses. Product designers can influence the way people experience products by paying attention to the multiple sensory aspects of product design. Designing sensory experiences can be aimed at communicating a consistent message to all sensory channels, making this...

Automated cartographic generalization in Italy

Automated cartographic generalization has been a challenging research field for over 30 years; nowadays thanks to the continuous research is becoming a concrete opportunity to increase the speed of map sets production and maintenance. As some National mapping agencies are working in this direction, in Italy automated cartographic generalization...

Why is Housing Always Satisfactory? A Study into the Impact of Preference and Experience on Housing Appreciation

This study focuses on residents’ perceptions of residential quality concerning 23 different dwelling aspects. Respondents were asked to indicate their appreciation of these dwelling aspects on a scale ranging from 0 (‘‘extremely unattractive’’) to 100 (‘‘extremely attractive’’). The influence of two potential factors on the appreciation of...

Campsites as utopias? A socio-spatial reading of the post-war holiday camp in Belgium, 1950s to 1970s

This paper contrasts the objectives that underlie the development of government-funded holiday camps for family vacations in Belgium with the socio-spatial practices of their initial users. Drawing on oral history, archival material, photographs and site plans, we argue that holidaymakers did not just experience the holiday camp as an...

Pleasure, arousal, dominance: Mehrabian and Russell revisited

This paper presents a discursive review of the dimensions pleasure, arousal and dominance that Mehrabian and Russell developed in 1974 to assess environmental perception, experience, and psychological responses. Since then numerous researchers applied these dimensions to assess the experience of the physical environment and its perceived...

Uncovering the secrets of a productive environment, A journey through the impact of plants and colour

This PhD concerns the relationship between the physical environment and knowledge productivity. To create an optimal environment it is important to study the needs of knowledge workers in connection to the characteristics of the physical environment. Two components of the physical environment have been analysed: plants and colour. The effects of...

Designing appropriate things: An experiential perspective on the effectiveness of artefacts in contributing to behaviour change

Behavioural design is an emergent discipline that aims to harness design’s influence on behaviour in an intentional way. However, there is limited knowledge on how to translate knowledge on behaviour and its determinants to specific design properties in ways that can maintain such change. We adopt a user experiential view to discuss the role...

Liminal design: A conceptual framework and three-step approach for developing technology that delivers transcendence and deeper experiences

As ubiquitous technology is increasingly mediating our relationships with the world and others, we argue that the sublime is struggling to find room in product design primarily aimed at commercial and transactional goals such as speed and efficiency. We suggest a new category of products to promote deeper and more meaningful experiences,...