UK Local Chapter launch big success

13 May 2013

On Thursday 9th May Loughborough Design School hosted the launch of the UK Local Chapter of the Design & Emotion Society. The Society has been in existence since 1999, formed following a seminar and workshop on the topic held in Delft. The Society raises issues and facilitates dialogue among practitioners, researchers and industry in order to integrate salient themes of emotional experience in the design profession.

The Society launched its local chapter initiative at the Design & Emotion conference in 2012 and Sam Porter of Loughborough Design School & James Rock of DesignThinkers Group were given the license to form a UK chapter.

There were two guest speakers at the event. The first was Prof. Paul Hekkert, the President of the Design & Emotion Society, who gave a brief introduction and history of the Society and introduced ten contemporary themes of research for Design & Emotion researchers in the immediate future. These included pleasure & fun, engagement and richness, aesthetics and semantics, multisensory experience and happiness and wellbeing.
Paul was followed by Patrick Jordan, who has recently been appointed a visiting Professor in the Design School. His talk was titled ‘Designing Dreams and Nightmares’ and he discussed designing for emotion in the context of three psychological theories the ‘Will to Power’, the ‘Will to Pleasure’ and the ‘Will to Meaning’. The presentations were followed by an informal networking event. There are plans for future events in different locations across the UK in the future.

Watch this space………


Extra:

Video recording of the event can be viewed here.

Pictures taken at the event can be viewed here.

New Design & Emotion Local Chapter to start in the UK

25 January 2013

Press release:

Loughborough University has joined forces with international innovation agency DesignThinkers Group to help promote and develop experience driven design.

The collaboration will form a new UK chapter of the Design and Emotion Society – a global network of academics, designers and companies who exchange research, tools and methods that support the involvement of human-centred emotional experience in the design process.

The partnership between the University’s Design School and DesignThinkers UK came about following the society’s 2012 international conference. Here it was identified that interest in this area of design is growing and local society chapters are needed to support this growth by providing workshops, lectures and networking opportunities.

To mark the launch of the new UK chapter the partners will be hosting an event at the University’s Design School in April.

Dr Samantha Porter from the Loughborough Design School said: “The University is delighted to be part of this new partnership. The school already carries out extensive research into experience driven design and we look forward to developing this area further.”

James Rock from DesignThinkers UK added: “As design innovators we are very pleased to be partnering with one of the UK’s leading design schools to further the development of emotionally rewarding and human-centred approaches to product and service design.”

Call for participation: Design and Reversal Theory

24 January 2013

Last September at the Design and Emotion conference in London, Michael Apter gave a keynote speech about Reversal theory, a psychological theory that he and others have been developing since the 1970s, and its possibilities for design. Reversal theory has been garnering an increasing amount of attentions among user-centered designers and design researchers, because of its dynamic perspective on human needs, motivation, and emotion. His talk attracted a lot of interest from both people that had previously worked with the theory and to those for whom it was completely new. Furthermore, quite a few people at the conference expressed the aim to use Reversal theory in some form in their future work.

To learn more about the possibilities of using Reversal theory in design, and to give design a visible place in Reversal theory in future collaboration, we would like to invite designers and design researchers to submit an abstract to the upcoming Reversal theory conference. This conference will be held from 16-19 July in Reims, France. Contributions should be a maximum of 1500 words and may discuss any kind of involvement of Reversal theory in both design research and design practice. Deadline for the extended abstract is 15 April. Please refer to the conference website for more details. We hope to see you in France!

Reversal theory: http://www.reversaltheory.org/
Conference website: http://irtc2013.sciencesconf.org/

Best wishes,
Steven Fokkinga, TU Delft
Pieter Desmet, TU Delft

News

• UK Local Chapter launch big success (13 May 2013)
• New Design & Emotion Local Chapter to start in the UK (25 Jan 2013)
• Call for participation: Design and Reversal Theory (24 Jan 2013)