A language for dealing with emotions in product innovation: a proposal

The knowledge of emotions is essential in all designs created for the customer (e.g. product design, service design, graphic design, food design). The complexity of designing a product-service system to provoke intended emotions involves the need to formulate a shareable, natural, and unambiguous language has emerged. This paper presents a language proposal to discuss emotions in product innovation, which is composed of three key concepts: the human-product emotional interactions, a framework of positive emotions and the emotional-jobs-to-be-done by a product. An exploratory survey with an international community of designers has been implemented in order to review the acceptance and understanding of this framework; the results of the exploratory survey have been the basis of the final refinement of the proposed language, which consists of 1) three categories of human-product emotional interaction, 2) 19 positive emotion types, and 3) 19 emotional jobs-to-done.