Attractive Things Work Better.
The Japenese found the attractive ones were perceived to be easierto use. Tractinsky was suspicious. Maybe the experiment had flaws. Or perhaps the result could be true of Japenese, but certainly not of Israelis. “Clearly”, said Tractinsky, “ aesthetic preferences are culturally dependent.” Moreover, he continued, “Japenese culture is kown for its aesthetic tradition,” but Israelis are action- oriented-they don’t care about beauty.
In the early 1900s, Herbert Read, who wrote numerous books on art and aesthetics, started, “it requires a somewhat mystical theory of aesthetics to find any necessary connection between beauty and function,” and that belief is still comman today. The interaction of affect, behaviour, and cognition, but Tractinsky’s results botheredme- I couldn’t explain them. Emotion, we now know, change the way the human mind solves problems- emotional system change how the cognitive system operates. So, if aesthetic would change our emotional state, that would explain the mystery. Until recently, emotion was an ill- explored part of human psychology. Some people thought it an evolutionary leftover from our animal origins. Most thought of emotions as a problem to be overcome by rational, logical thinking. And most of the research focused upon negative emotions such as stress, fear, anxiety, and anger. Then the human being the most emotional of all. Moreover, emotions play a crictical role in daily lives, helping assess situations as good or bad, safe or dangerous. Positive emotions are as important as negative one- positive emotions are crictical to learning, curiosity, and creative thought, and today research is turning toward this dimension. The psychologist Alice Isen and her colleagues have shown that being happy broadens the thought processes and facilitates creative thinking. When you feel good, Isen discovered, you are better at brainstorming, at examining multiple alternatives.
When people are anxious they tend to narrow their thought processes, concentrating upon aspects directly relevant to a problem. This is a useful strategy in escaping from danger, but not in thinking of imaginative new approaches to a problem. Isen’s result show that when people are relaxed and happy, their thought processes expand, becoming more creative, more imaginative. These and related finding suggest the role of aesthetics in product design: attractive things make people feel good, which in turn make them think more creatively. With most products, if the first thing you try fails to produce the desired result, the most natural response is to try again, only with the more effort. In today’s world, doing the same operation over again is very unlikely to yield better results. The correct response is to look for alternative solutions. The tendency to repeat the same operation over again is especially likely for those who are anxious or tense. Then, theyget even more tense, more anxious, and increase their concentration upon those troublesome details. In the words, happy people are most effective in finding alternative solutions and, as a result, are tolerant of minor difficulties. Herbert Read thought we would need a mystical theory to connect beauty and function. Affect, emotion, and cognition have also evolved to interact with and complement one another.
Human beings are, of course, the most complex of all animals, with accordingly complex brain structures. But we are also have powerful brain mechanisms for accomplishing things, for creating, and acting. And finally,unique among animals, we have anguages and art, humor and music. There are three different levels of the brain: the automatic, prewired layer, called the visceral level; the part that contains the brain processes that control everyday behaviour, known as the behavioural level; and the contemplative part of the brain, or the reflective level. At the highest evolutionary level of development, the human brain can think abiout its own operations. This is the home of reflection, of conscious thought, of the learning of new concepts and generalizations about the world. The result is that everything you do has both a cognitive and an affective component- cognitive to assign meaning, affective to assign value.
Positive affect arouses curiosity, engages creativity, and makes the brain into an effective learning organism. With positive affect, you are more likely to see the forest than the trees, to prefer the big picture and not to concentrate upon details. On the other hand, when you are sad or anxious, feeling negative affect, you are more likely to see the trees before the forest, the details before the big picture.
Then, emotions, moods, traits, and personality are all aspects of the different ways in which people’s mind work, especially along the affective, emotional domain. Emotions change behavior over a relatively short term, for they are responsive to the immediate events. The behavioural and reflective levels, however, are very sensitive to experiences, training, and education. Cultural views have huge impact here:what one culture finds appealing, another may not. So what is the designer to do? In part, that is the theme of the rest of the book. But the challenges should be thought of as opportunities. Designers will never lack for things to do, for new approaches to explore.
The design requirements for each level deffer widely. The visceral level is pre- consciousness, pre-consciousness, pre-thought. This is where appearance matters and first impressions are formed. Visceral design s about the initial impact of a product, about its appearance, touch, and feel. The behavioural level is about use, about experience with a product. But experience itself has many facets, function, performance, and usability. Then, performance is about how well the product does those desired functions-if the performance is inadequate, the product fails. At the lower visceral and behavioural levels, there is only affect, but without interpretation or consciousness. Interpretation, understanding, and reasoning come from the reflective level. Then, the three levels, the reflective one is the most vulnerable to variability through culture, experience, education, and individual differences. This level can also override the others. Hence, one person’s liking for otherwise distasteful or frightening visceral experiences that might repel others. Reflective design,is about long term relations, about the feelings of satisfaction produced by owning, displaying, and using a product.
Get three levels of design,each of that –visceral, behavioural, and reflective, plays its part in shaping your experience. Each is an important as the others, buut each requires a different approach by the designer. Visceral design is what nature does. We are exquisitely tuned to receive powerful emotional signals from the environment that get interpreted automatically at the visceral level. Then, behavioural design is all about use. Apperance doesn’t really matter. Rationale doesn’t matter. Performance does. This is the aspect of design that practitioners in the usability community focus upon. The first step in good behavioral design is to understand just how people use a product. Lastly reflective lecvel operations often determine a person’s overall impression of a product. The overall impact of a product through reflection in retrospective memory and reassessment.
