Materials Experience

Fundamentals of Materials and Design

Elvin Karana,Owain Pedgley,Valentina Rognoli

• Editorial: Butterworth-Heinemann
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780080993768
• Categoría: Design
• Categoría: Industriedesign

There currently exists an abundance of materials selection advice for designers suited to solving technical product requirements. In contrast, a stark gap can be found in current literature that articulates the very real personal, social, cultural and economic connections between materials and the design of the material world. In Materials Experience: Fundamentals of Materials and Design, thirty-four of the leading academicians and experts, alongside 8 professional designers, have come together for the first time to offer their expertise and insights on a number of topics common to materials and product design. The result is a very readable and varied panorama on the world of materials and product design as it currently stands.

• Contributions by many of the most prominent materials experts and designers in the field today, with a foreword by Mike Ashby
• The book is organized into 4 main themes: sustainability, user interaction, technology and selection
• Between chapters, you will find the results of interviews conducted with internationally known designers
• These 'designer perspectives' will provide a 'time out' from the academic articles, with emphasis placed on fascinating insights, product examples and visuals

Section 1

Touched by Materials

Outline

Introduction

Chapter 1 Designing Material Experience

Chapter 2 Sensing Materials

Chapter 3 Tactile Aesthetics of Materials and Design

Chapter 4 The Sound and Taste of Materials

Chapter 5 Manipulating the Material Code

Chapter 6 The Immaterial of Materials

Interview with Hella Jongerius

Interview with Ece Yalim

Introduction

This section focuses on user–material interactions and the experiences that result from those interactions. The contributing authors explore how people approach to materials, how they sense them, how they attribute meanings to them, and how they build deeper relationships with them.

Chapter 1

Designing Material Experience

Paul Hekkert and Elvin Karana, Delft University of Technology

Abstract

If you aim to design a particular user experience, the material properties of the object may play a decisive role in being successful. Would the lightweight car door give you the proper impression of a luxury car? And does a perfectly polished doorknob feel natural? Maybe not. Materials can feel artificial, sound reliable, and (can make a product) look ‘cool’, they can be just pleasant to touch or look at, and cause us to experience disgust, admiration or surprise. In this chapter, we will look into these various ways in which materials can be experienced, ranging from the meanings we attribute to them, the aesthetic pleasure we obtain from perceiving them, and the emotions they may evoke in the context of a designed object. The goal of designing an intended (material) experience must be grounded in an understanding of the processes that underlie people’s material experiences more generally.

Keywords

emotions to materials; expectations; material aesthetics; meanings of materials; product experience

Contents

From Product to Material Experience

Types of experience

Material aesthetics

Emotions to materials

Meanings of Materials

Universal meanings

Learned meanings

How meanings change

Designing Material Experience

References

More than half of the world's population lives in city centres. This is putting an increasingly heavy burden on traditional means of inner city transport. We believe this asks for a new and fresh approach to inner city mobility. We are a young ambitious Dutch company that originated out of love for bicycles and hunger for change.

At VANMOOF we pursue only one goal: help the ambitious city dweller worldwide move around town fast, confident and in style. We stripped the traditional Dutch bike from redundant hoo-ha, that can only break or frustrate, and added sensibility instead. The result? Simplistic striking bikes so smooth that they fit your style demands, yet so functional they make you go to work whistling. The no-nonsense VANMOOF bike is the ultimate urban commuter tool, anywhere around the globe. Be aware “cause we shake the unshakable”!

Both quotes are taken from the Web site of Van Moof (2012), a Dutch bike manufacturer. The first quote describes the future world of biking, as seen by the company, and the second, Van Moof's brand identity. Together they shape the context underlying the design (the “why”) that boils down to the fictitious (mission) statement: “VANMOOF wants to fuel the ambition of commuters and make them ‘go to work whistling’”.

In the second quote, this goal is translated into an intended user experience (the “how”) and the qualities of a subsequent bike design (the “what”; Hekkert and van Dijk, 2011). At the user experience level, the level that follows immediately from the context, the company promises to make you move around town fast, confident and in style. These qualities describe the interaction between a (future) user and the to-be-designed bike; they indicate how users will (or should) experience the bike. From these interaction qualities, the product qualities can be derived. In order to facilitate fast, stylish, and confident driving, the bike has to be nonredundant, simple, sensible, smooth, and no-nonsense.

This short example of experience-driven design by following a why–how–what model makes perfect sense and allows a designer to define up front what the product must do and express (what) in order to attain a desired user or product experience (how). Both are firmly rooted in a (future) world, a world that is viewed and shaped by the designer in order to decide what experiential and/or behavioral effects the product will have on people (why).

Now that a vision on the new bike is defined, the next design stage can take place: how to implement these product and interaction qualities in the design of a bike. The quoted paragraphs only suggest removing all nonessentials from a normal bike, a step toward this goal—“we stripped the traditional Dutch bike from redundant hoo-ha”. But if we look carefully at the result, the VANMOOF bike (Figure 1.1), we could identify some further design decisions that support the intended user experience in the indicated way.

FIGURE 1.1 Standard VANMOOF bike. Courtesy of VANMOOF.

The bike has no visible extras; it looks very simple and basic. Its aluminum color adds to the impression of smoothness and no-nonsense. Significantly, and giving the bike its distinctive, stylish look, the lights are integrated in the top tube, in such a way that they allow for confident riding in the dark. The bikes are equipped with a Dutch-style kickback brake, further adding to the clean outlook. With so little visual noise and bulb, the bike affords fast and confident driving. The thick wide wheels make riding on and off pavements and obstacles problem free. The broad handlebar and durable Schwalbe tires top-off the smooth no-nonsense look. Maybe most importantly, the VANMOOF has a striking aluminum rust-free frame, a lightweight material that facilitates speedy riding.

From this brief analysis, we can see that the intended user experience has consequences for the product's technology (e.g., in-built lighting), form (e.g., top tube), color, and material selection: the material of the frame, tires, and brakes all significantly contribute to a fast, stylish, and confident driving experience. Apparently and intuitively, the VANMOOF designers did the right thing and materialized the intended experience. To make such a process more deliberate, the question that will be addressed in the remainder of this chapter is “Can we design a material experience?”

From Product to Material Experience

Over the past years, we have seen a steady stream of publications reporting ways to capture and analyze “user experience” (e.g., Hassenzahl, 2011; Law et al., 2009) or “product experience” (e.g., Desmet and Hekkert, 2007; Schifferstein and Hekkert, 2008). Despite failed attempts to adequately define the two concepts, both refer to a similar phenomenon and their advocates seem to agree on the following characteristics:

1. Experiences are inherently subjective. Experiences take place in (the mind and heart of) the user and only he or she has access to the felt quality of this experience. This does not automatically imply that the user can always correctly recall and/or report experiences. Experiences are notoriously difficult to verbalize. Even more difficult for users is to correctly identify where experiences come from and what their causes are (e.g., Wilson, 2002). For that reason, we have seen an accumulation of sophisticated methods to capture and scrutinize experiences (e.g., experience sampling, Larson and Csikszentmihalyi, 1983; Day Reconstruction Method (DRM), Kahneman et al., 2004).

2. Product (or user) experiences arise in interaction with a product. By definition, product experiences refer to those experiences that are evoked by interacting with a product. They may result from actual use (hence, user experience), but could also be evoked by simply anticipating usage or thinking about a product (see Desmet and Hekkert, 2007). The product, with all of its properties, thus plays a main part in this process. When the product is an interactive device, we typically speak of user experiences.

3. Experiences are affected by personal and situational factors. Because of their subjective nature, experiences are determined by the mind(set) of the user, his or her goals, expectations, dreams, and desires. Also, experiences are heavily influenced by the context of use. That glass of Raki on the sunlit terrace during a holiday in Turkey tastes completely different from a similar glass 2 weeks later at home in the gray and cold Netherlands.

4. Experiences develop or change over time. During the episode of using a product—say, making a cup of espresso with your new machine—the experience will not be constant and similar over the full 45 s (e.g., Laurans et al., 2012). Product properties you are dealing with change over time, and so may your mood or expectations in response to the product. Accordingly, experiences may easily differ at different moments of use over time (e.g., Karapanos et al., 2010).

Types of experience

We may feel confident on our bike, astonished over the power of our new laptop, relieved to see the old record player still works, get frightened by the smoke coming out of our toaster, and proud to own a Tag Heuer watch. Product experiences come in many kinds and types. Some experiences are pleasant and companies (should) certainly make an effort to design for these and avoid unpleasant ones (Jordan, 2000). Or should they? Recently, design researchers have started to explore the relative benefit of unpleasant experiences in achieving our goals (e.g., Fokkinga and Desmet, 2012). Some talk of sensory experiences and, thereby, implicitly suggest that other experiences do not require sense perception, but may be merely cognitive.

The, so far, most sensible—admittedly, we are biased—distinction as to different types of experiences was proposed by us (Desmet and Hekkert, 2007; Schifferstein and Hekkert, 2008). It is defendable to speak of an aesthetic experience, an experience of meaning, and an emotional experience. Where the aesthetic experience involves the degree to which an object delights our senses, an emotional experience arises from goal attainment (e.g., happy) or violation (e.g., sad). The experience of meaning is all about attributing characteristics to objects, such as smooth, usable, or feminine. These three types of experience often appear as three components of a single experience, and may therefore be hard to separate while actually engaged in the experience. Moreover, they are clearly related and affect each other's quality (e.g., Desmet and Hekkert, 2007). Nevertheless, as to their underlying process, they can be conceptually separated.

Next, we will explain more in depth the underlying processes that result in each of the three types of experience. These processes not only explain why (and when) we have a particular experience, they also predict when such experiences are most likely to be universal—everybody will pretty much have the same experience—and when (groups of) people, such as different cultures, will have different experiences. It is our firm belief that one can only meaningfully talk about cultural or individual differences when one understands the psychological mechanism that is rooted in human nature and that may (occasionally) lead to universal agreement. Although the mechanisms are—obviously—generic and not specific for our interaction with objects, we will limit ourselves as much as possible to the way materials and material properties can lead to these experiences. When considering material experiences, we believe “the experience of meaning” is the most relevant category and this type of meaning will therefore be treated...

Índice

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Biography
• Foreword: Materials Experience—Fundamentals of Materials and Design
• Preface
• Introduction to Materials Experience
• Section 1: Touched by Materials
• Section 2: Living with Materials
• Section 3: Futures through Materials
• Section 4: Proficiency in Materials
• Inspirational Resources for Materials and Design
• Index