| Summary: | In my teaching and software development practice, I realized that most applications with human-computer
interaction do not respond to usersâ emotional needs. The dualism of reason and emotion as two
fairly opposite entities that dominated Western philosophy was also reflected in software design.
Computing was originally intended to provide applications for military and industrial activities and was
primarily associated with cognition and rationality. Today, more and more computer applications interact
with users in very complex and sophisticated ways. In human-computer interaction, attention is given to
issues of usability and user modeling, but techniques to emotionally engage users or respond to their
emotional needs have not been fully developed, even as specialists like Klein, Norman and Picard argued
that machines that recognize and express emotions respond better and more appropriately to user
interaction (Picard, 1997; Picard & Klein, 2002; Norman, 2004). This study investigated emotion from
designersâ perspectives and tentatively concludes that there is little awareness and involvement in
emotional design in the IT community. By contrast, participants in this study (36 IT specialists from
various fields) strongly supported the idea of emotional design and confirmed the need for methodologies
and theoretical models to research emotional design. Based on a review of theory, surveys and interviews,
I identified a set of themes for heuristics of emotional design and recommended future research
directions. Attention was given to consequences; participants in this study raised issues of manipulation,
ethical responsibilities of designers, and the need for regulations, and recommended that emotional design
should carry standard ethical guidelines for games and any other applications. The research design
utilized a mixed QUAN-qual methodological model proposed by Creswell (2003) and Gay, Mills, and
Airasian (2006), which was modified to equally emphasize both quantitative and qualitative stages. An
instrument in the form of a questionnaire was designed, tested and piloted in this study and will be
improved and used in future research.
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