Death and Catharsis: Re-defining Pleasure by Design

In designing for positive emotional experience, there is no common definition of pleasure as used within the design professions. In addition to the idiosyncratic nature of human-product interactions, the tendency toward emotive design based on surface-level details for short-lived positive reactions must be broadened to address more sustained, reflective responses to products, as interpreted in context of use. A relatively unexplored area of design and emotion is constituted around ritual artifacts. For example, design research concerning the processes and products associated with death may seem at first to have little connection to a discussion of pleasure in design. Yet, the artifacts and rituals surrounding our last rite of passage can be argued as relevant to pleasure both in terms of their ability to facilitate positive memories and the need to mourn, and in reducing the effects of psychological pain through therapeutic or cathartic experience. The insights promoted through this research discussion suggest the need for broader interpretations of pleasure, and the benefits of re-defining pleasure in applications of design and emotion

A practical review of energy saving technology for ageing populations

Fuel poverty is a critical issue for a globally ageing population. Longer heating/cooling requirements combine with declining incomes to create a problem in need of urgent attention. One solution is to deploy technology to help elderly users feel informed about their energy use, and empowered to take steps to make it more cost effective and efficient. This study subjects a broad cross section of energy monitoring and home automation products to a formal ergonomic analysis. A high level task analysis was used to guide a product walk through, and a toolkit approach was used thereafter to drive out further insights. The findings reveal a number of serious usability issues which prevent these products from successfully accessing an important target demographic and associated energy saving and fuel poverty outcomes. Design principles and examples are distilled from the research to enable practitioners to translate the underlying research into high quality design-engineering solutions

Death: artefact and process in the last rite of passage

Bibliography: p. 72-75

Towards emotional well-being by design 17 opportunities for emotion regulation for user-centered healthcare design

Recent attention has been given to the role of emotion regulation in promoting well-being. Although various approaches have been established to design for emotion in design research and HCI, there is only little knowledge on how to support the process of regulating user emotions through design. The paper introduces a framework that delineates 17 emotion regulation strategies based on the theories of emotion regulation. The framework supports an understanding of emotion regulation strategies by enabling designers to compare differences and overlaps of the strategies. The paper describes the framework and its development process along with design examples. Implications and future research steps are discussed