Lecture: Design, Emotion, Perception & Illusion

Our first lecture with Tracy explored the emotional approach to design - that everything designed shouldn't just be for the purpose of 'design sake', but for emotional reasons. The lecture looked at our way of using our own senses and how we value them; because of the amount of information around our daily lives it's very hard for us to process a huge amount of information, so we, as humans, ignore things that we don't see fit as value - taking notice of the more important things.

Looking at our most important sense - sight, which the brain processes up to 70% of the information solely on, we learned that we see everything upside down, shown in a Youtube Documentary and infact that our brain uncodes this so we can make sense of the world. This shows 'how the slightest thing can have a huge impact on on us and our behavior'

Perception: How we interpret to make sense to us. Depending on how we feel is how we interpret things, for example, when looking at something that has 'hidden' images in (see below) you may choose to see something that is otherwise not there to other people, all depending on what we feel at the current moment and actually want to see.

 

The lecture also looked at a BBC Four documentary which explored senses, particularly in the documentary there was a 48 hour expeirment where people were placed inside a bunker with no noise (showing an example of how we rely on sound) Eventually into the experiment a lot of the personnell involved starting visualizing things or creating their own noise, forcing a lot of anxiety between them and the situation. 

Every sense is essential to our development, we, as designers, have to look more into the emotional responses that our designs would influence someone into thinking a certain way, and not just from a design sake. Although the lecture, to me, wasn't very benefical, I can see why we need to look more in-depth at why stuff is presented in different ways.