Emotional design

Emotions Generated by the Experience of Interacting with a Space.

Layane El-Amine

School of Architecture and Design

FND281: Design Culture

Prof. Karma Dabaghi

December 5, 2020
Emotional design

Emotional design is defined as the design that predicts and assists the users’ needs and

responses. A space oriented by the designer to achieve an emotional design is technically a space

that is user oriented, a designer works on emotional measurements while the user or viewer lives

an emotional state. In the 20th century, emotions became a crucial influence in the field of design.

This paper shows the importance of emotional design in making architecture an interesting

domain for the viewer through his emotions and experience in space. In what’s next, the paper

will provide you of an overview of the response and measurements of emotions developed

through an interaction with space, a research about a case study of how people responded to a

design emotionally through an explanatory illustrative example.

Certainly the designer has a message or emotion that he wants to be transferred, but at the end

of the day it is the emotional response of the user that decides it all. The designer develops a

measurement of emotions that they want to apply to users in a certain space, and that user, grows

an emotional state issued from their philosophical way of thinking, their psychology and their

physiology, thus resulting in different responses coming from different users. Psychologists

define emotions as a procedure of variation in different elements rather than a unified state.

There are many stimuli and situation that lead to different emotional responses, that’s why, we

can’t say that there is one fixed method to measure emotions. The response can be experiential,

and that’s when the individual is aware of his emotions and knows what stimulated them, or it

could be a behavioral response, by that we mean that each emotion is related to a chain of

expression, as an example on that we can cite a rise in the voice, fixed stare, brisk movements...

in this case we are talking about anger. Many components in architecture cause people’s

emotions. In a space, emotional stimuli can be dissected into two points according to the users’

interaction with space, emotional expression and emotional exchange. Emotional expression
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moves the user’s emotion in a space while the emotional exchange highlights the interaction

between the user and space.

Conceptual framework for emotion measurement in an architectural space

A viewer might respond to the architect’s intention through an emotional expression by looking

and analyzing a building. Through their designs, architects try to express a certain intention in

space, while users on the other hand, live in that same space, a different experience. The user

perceives an architectural space through the composition and visuals, the form and

morphological factor (complexity, proportion…), and features such as non-geometric shapes lead

to an emotional response. We need to also consider the perceptible factor of texture, color,

smell… that leads to a sensational pleasure obtained by a building. In this case, the viewer deals

with stimulation of senses issued from the cited elements. And lastly we have the mental or

perceptual factor is the reciprocal reaction resulting from human emotions. Coming to the

emotional response that might occur, the experimental feeling can be generated either because of

the space itself where the emotions are obtained from a change of emotions, -like the stimulation

of a memory that could relate to a positive or negative event-, or by the information that the user

processes about the space that comes from the purpose of the place, -library, museum…-. While

the behavioral response is the one that other people can see through facial expression and other

body behaviors.
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To verify what was proposed above concerning emotional measurements in an architectural

space, an explanation about musalla Anwar al-Sabbah designed by Hani Asfour will be

presented. Through the musalla, Anwar designed a leaning cube inspired by the Kaaba in terms

of dimension and scale, formed from local white tiles with five horizontal windows created with

translucent marble. The musalla consists of elements that can be divided by important numbers

in Islam (three, five, seven). Each element in the musalla represents a traditional architecture in

Islam and history. At first, we noticed a minimal exterior forming an acute angle that was

designed to point to the qibla. Then there’s a narrow entrance and long walls with stairs leading

to the sky that make the visitor question his existence. Then, looking at the walls, we can read

Arabic calligraphy letters that are keys from different surahs of the Quran, that until now, remain

a mystery. The musalla leads to a bodily and spiritual experience that makes the visitor question

the human existence and his fragile condition, and be able to understand and raise his soul to the

creator. The spiritual progression has been put together from the moment the viewer fixes his

eyes on the undefined cube, starting from the garden that leads to an infinite number of occurring

thoughts, then heading to the narrow staircase that is naturally drawn from the shades of a light
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leading us into the unknown, to the calligraphy that makes you question their meaning and

agitates your curiosity to know the secret message hidden through them, and finally the inside of

the unfamiliar construction, an interior that is as elegant but irregular as it is from the outside.

The viewer’s emotions are stimulated through, perceptual factors since he lives and integration

and experience in space, plus he becomes aware of the context behind the architectural design,

mental factors like volume, façade and simplicity of the musalla, and the sensory factors such as

light, material and color. Because of these factors, the viewer is able to understand the message

and story that the space is providing, but at the same time, living different emotions than another

person standing at the same spot, and that’s because the viewer is now able to stimulate other

senses besides sight.

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Starting from the 20th century, emotion took a big step into design and made architects pursue the

goal of moving user’s emotions through a design in space, and that’s because they aim to

emphasis the interaction between human and design, to make architecture a more interesting

experience for the viewer, since they are now not only looking at a design, but they’re able to

communicate and discover a message in a certain space, and live their own experience that lead

to an emotional stimulation. The musalla was a perfect example to show how different factors

affect people’s emotions and show how different users experience different emotion looking at

the same design. Emotions make architecture that interesting for the reason that they are created

because of an interaction between human and space for embodying emotions through a broader

perspective.

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consumer products research, Delft University of Technology.

2. Lang, J., Ed. (1987). Creating architectural theory: The role of the behavioural sciences in environmental design. New York, Van Nostrand

Reinhold.

3. Haidt, J. and Keltner, D. (1999). Culture and Facial Expression: Open-ended Methods Find More Expressions and a Gradient of

Recognition. Journal of Cognition and Emotion.

4. Lang, J., Ed. (1988). Symbolic aesthetics in architecture: Toward a research agenda. Environmental aesthetics: Theory, research, and

applications. Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press.

5. Lang, P. J., Bradley, M. M. and Cuthbert, B. N. (1998). Emotion, motivation, and anxiety: brain mechanisms and psychophysiology.

Journal of Biological psychiatry.

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Funology. Norwell, MA, USA, Kluwer Academic Publishers.