Product relevant emotions in the Spanish language

Juan Carlos Ortíz Nicolás - Centro de Investigaciones de Diseño Industrial,
Irma Hernández López - Mool Design, D.F., México.

This paper reports a five-stage study to identify what emotions are product relevant in Mexican culture, and to cross-compare these with the emotions identified in a prior study carried out in the Netherlands. 34 emotion terms in the Spanish language were identified as product relevant, 17 of which were related to product appearance. 21 emotion terms that were identified in this study coincide with the emotions reported in the Netherlands, especially with positive ones. Respondents reported more frequently positive emotion terms as product relevant than negative ones. This might have occurred because respondents had to recall the emotions that they experienced with products. Some of the emotion terms that were frequently elicited by product appearance in this study are: Atracción, Deseo, Diversión, Emoción y Sorpresa (Attraction, Desire, Amusement, Excitement, and Surprise). These emotion terms can be the basis for developing a rating scale for product emotions suitable for the Mexican context. We stress that more cultural studies are needed to have a better general validity of results, and to make the field of design research better at understanding emotions, emotional design and user experience.

Keywords: product relevant emotions, product appearance, design

Design & Emotion Conference, 2008, Hong Kong

We focused on durable products