Emotional Design by Donald A. Norman

value but are weak, cheap, or sentimental.” “Sentimental” means, according to the American Heritage Dictionary , “resulting from or colored by emotion rather than reason or realism.” “Emotion rather than reason”—well, yes, that is precisely the point.
    Yogi Berra put it this way: “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” Or, translating this to design, “Nobody likes kitsch, it’s too popular.” Yup. If too many people like something, there must be something wrong with it. But isn’t that very popularity telling us something? We should stop to consider just why it is popular. People find value in it. It satisfies some basic need. Those who deride kitsch are looking at the wrong aspects.
    Yes, the cheap reproductions of famous paintings, buildings, and monuments are “cheap.” They have little artistic merit, being copies of existing work, and poor copies at that. There is little intellectual depth, for the creativity and insight is part of the original, not the copy. Similarly, most souvenirs and popular trinkets are gaudy,
schmaltzy, “excessively or insincerely emotional.” But while this may be true of the object itself, that object is important only as a symbol, as a source of memory, of associations. The word souvenir means “a token of remembrance, a memento.” The very sentimentality the world of art or design derides is the source of something’s strength and popularity. Kitschy objects of the sort shown in figure 2.2 do not pretend to be art—they are aids to memory.
    In the world of design, we tend to associate emotion with beauty. We build attractive things, cute things, colorful things. However important these attributes, they are not what drive people in their everyday lives. We like attractive things because of the way they make us feel. And in the realm of feelings, it is just as reasonable to become attached to and love things that are ugly as it is to dislike things that would be called attractive. Emotions reflect our personal experiences, associations, and memories.

    FIGURE 2.2 A souvenir monument.
    Although often denounced as “kitsch,” unworthy of being considered as art, souvenirs are rich in emotional meanings because of the memories they evoke. (Author’s collection.)
    In The Meaning of Things, a book that should be required reading for designers, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton study what makes things special. The authors went into homes and interviewed the residents, trying to understand their relationship to the things about them, to their material possessions. In particular, they asked each person to show things that were “special” to him or her,
and then, in the extensive interviews, explored what factors made them so. Special objects turned out to be those with special memories or associations, those that helped evoke a special feeling in their owners. Special items all evoked stories. Seldom was the focus upon the item itself: what mattered was the story, an occasion recalled. Thus, one woman interviewed by Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton pointed to her living-room chairs and said: “They are the first two chairs me and my husband ever bought, and we sit in them and I just associate them with my home and having babies and sitting in the chairs with babies.”
    We become attached to things if they have a significant personal association, if they bring to mind pleasant, comforting moments. Perhaps more significant, however, is our attachment to places: favorite corners of our homes, favorite locations, favorite views. Our attachment is really not to the thing, it is to the relationship, to the meanings and feelings the thing represents. Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton identify “psychic energy” as the key. Psychic energy, by which we mean mental energy, mental attention. Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow”