Enriching gifts: experience design to understand human relationships.

• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20403641

Gifts are experiential objects that are imbued with human feelings and also reciprocal objects that invoke social interactions. Gifts help to build, enhance, and maintain human relationships by forming physical and emotional connections. Gifts not only embody aesthetic value via their appearance as physical things but also reflect the feelings and routine practices of the culture within which they are exchanged. However, in the field of design, most scholarship is still focused on the gift as a thing rather than the experience surrounding it. Designers need to not only explore the physical properties of materials when they are designing a product that can be given as a gift, but also the related socially ritualized behaviors and subjective sensory experiences that those properties have embodied. In this thesis, I propose that when designing a gift, designers design not only things but also experiences. Thus, this thesis explores the emotional and subjective meanings surrounding gifts rather than the meanings associated with their physical properties.--Author's abstract