Design for Emotion / Design for Children

Designing for Emotion = Designing for Children

I’ve been reading Aarron Walter’s Designing for Emotion in small bites for a couple of weeks now.  I would consider it essential reading for anyone trying to understand the discipline of design, especially within a psychological context.  One line in particular stood out almost immediately:

*”people will forgive shortcomings, follow your lead, and sing your praises if you reward them with positive emotion.”*

I’ve tried to put some of the ideas from the book into practice on my Saturday sessions with my kids.  They are little bubbles of emotion, and are in some ways a perfect test cohort.  They are without a doubt the most wonderful part of my life, even when they are trying to teach me things that I am slow to learn.

Aside: I have been told and firmly believe that there is “work” that a person undertakes when raising children that is not achievable in any other way.  Not by caring for a pet, or an aging parent, or a sick friend, or even a life-partner.  It is the intersection of ultimate responsibility and limitless change; for while the love we pour into any of those aforementioned may equal those we give to our children, the rate of change is not the same.  Children are in a constant state of flux, more rapid than most adults are comfortable keeping up with.  There may be those who can keep up with the rate of change of children for a while.  But over the long run, its best to accept that they will change faster than we can adjust to.

Saturday mornings are a time for me to focus on my children (6 and 3), as we are left to our own shenanigans while their mom is teaching a Zumba class.  My most basic goal is to keep the kids happy and engaged for the 2-3 hours that we have, without completely trashing the house in the process.  We are getting it half right.  The house is usually trashed by the end.  But they’re engaged for sure so I can live with some collateral damage.

For the past few weeks we have been designing and working on 1) a dragon/dinosaur costume, made of discarded cardboard boxes from holiday gifts and leftover decorations from a recent birthday party, and 2) a set of dowel / duct tape / pipe insulation swords.  The costume idea sparked from watching the New Year’s parade in Burlington, where each year there is a parade of Chinese-style dragons.

Strategy: Like any aspiring acolyte in the Agile / Lean UX / UX space, I set about building a minimal viable dragon costume.  I wanted to couple both the experience of building it and the resulting product to positive emotional experience for the kids.  Sure – I can go to Amazon and probably find an awesome costume for both of them, and they may love it.   But I want to invest them in the creation process so they take a  sense of ownership that lasts, and see if that helps them keep the costume from being prematurely discarded or ruined.

Tactics: We broke apart a few boxes and retaped them to create the body, carving holes for arms to slide through and cutting off smaller pieces to use as wings.  Then we cut a sharp-toothed mouth into a postal box, that become the head.  Duct tape was used to cover unsightly text, seams, or blemishes on the body.  A lot of glue was dripped onto the head and it was covered with streamer fragments – this was the part that the kids love the most.

The outcome of about 2 hours of work looks like this:

We have a long way to go – but their sense of pride in just about 2 hours of work total is pretty impressive.  And the costume is seeing some pretty serious usage.

Now to move past the prototype…