A UX designer must constantly inform their designs by their user. As I am considering form at the moment, I wanted to explore in which ways I can be creative and to the greatest extent match the form with the feeling that I wish to project on the user. An easy way to do this was to hand out small pieces of paper with the two emotions together with a chunk of clay and ask users to project the feeling onto the clay.
Although I acknowledge this is very subjective and difficult to attain, my goal is for the object to act as a friend, holding your hand through your often tedious rehabilitation plan. And as a good friend would, he feels proud when you have done a good job, and disappointed when not. Asking people how they perceive these emotions in physical space helped inform my decisions. As you can see below, twenty miniature sculptures started to take shape and revealed some (not too surprising) patterns.
As you can see, all the "disappointed" sculptures let your eye flow start at a more positive point and end negative. You could clearly see how users attempted to communicate a sense of time or change of state with this static object - as disappointment requires a prior condition.
Proud exhibited static, strong vertical lines as expected, but also representations of simple joy. Although this exercise did not yield any extraordinary results, this was a very helpful exercise in my design process. It got me thinking about how I can represent different states even within a static shape, and how generalized forms can be re-contextualized.
