Emotional Design/Art
The emotional design/art experiment was a project that aims to explore the different means through which one manipulates certain design elements to evoke an emotional outcome. This project came to interest because I have been working on the aesthetic and subsequent emotional value of my work to develop a stronger connection with viewers. I thought that if I take a more abstract approach with a focus on visual design, I can achieve a form of emotional resonance through my work.
Art By: Chris Liu Steven Wong Faiyeung Szeto
Hypothesis
The theoretical approach is that there are particular art techniques and design elements that are capable of sparking essentially an emotion or 'attitude' towards the product of creation subjectively dependent on their cognitive, affective and behavioral values. With this in mind I held the hypothesis that if I emulate some of the skills and techniques of other artists/designers I can achieve an emotional outcome.
Methodology
The different methods that I explored to achieve an emotional outcome through design included: personally produced design, participant input based design and hybridized art design(engaging more than one style in a single piece of work). Personally produced design was based off solely my own input and an individually driven process. I thought that if I am capable of resonating emotions through my own subjective approach, perhaps I can measure my individual work level of emotional impact. Participant input based design would allow others to integrate their own feedback and opinions into the design in a co-creative type manner. The importance of engaging in production with the others was continually emphasized in research, therefore this compliant working strategy I hoped would have a solid emotional outcome. The hybridized art design was an approach that I utilized to help develop clear recognition. With utmost distinguishable contrast in style, I was aiming to convey a powerful emotional shift within the proximity of one piece of art design. To attempt to produce this peculiar art style for my project, I looked at a range of different arts which utilized more than one art style such as half geometric art and hybrid art.
Personally Produced Design
This art design piece gave me the most subjective freedom and I had the flexibility to immerse my thoughts into the design. Ultimately my aim was to create emotion within my work so I chose to look at designing things an image deep meaning. For this piece of art I focused on creating a melancholic, lonely feel. I have implemented mostly a grey theme, with slight varying tones. Based on the composition of the image, most people felt it reflected solitude, in deep thoughts, sullen type of feeling which is more or less what I had aimed to achieve. Thus I was satisfied with the outcome and found the triggers to this emotional outcome (composition and color). The process consisted of placing a few hundred triangles as there is no other method currently able to do this, additional to the fact that manually we have a better perception of depth than computers. As one could expect it was very time consuming but worth the outcome. |
Participant Based Design
I felt that the participant design would prove to be the most successful in terms of emotional resonance. This was because it was a jointly designed art piece that implemented the opinions of both parties - myself and some participants. I found it a real challenge to generate ideas by myself, however communicating with participants meant that I could get some contribution. Some of the feedback I had prior to designing this was that he thought "art/design resonates emotion when it connects with you on a personal level. When it means something more. It links to deeper ideas. It questions and challenges you. In this intellectual way it moves and stirs a reaction, a feeling and therefore emotion. But on another level art displays it's beauty through all the components like colour, medium and composition. It should give you a sense of what that figure in the painting is feeling, or feel the power of dynamic abstract paintings that convey movement or still life paintings that tell a story through what objects are focused on and their composition." This process involved engaging with the task along with the support of my peers and synergizing our thoughts into one. The participants were very helpful along the way as they considered many factors before giving their opinions. We had to first address what sort of topic we would focus on, and an idea was landscapes. They felt that I should flow towards more the positive feelings, and thus listed a list of techniques I would use to convey the positive spectrum of emotions. I play around with lighting and also the medium (3D modeling programs) as a unique approach to this and then photoshopped it to create this outcome. This was a very time demanding task as it required working in different programs and testing a range of alternative design techniques.
I felt that the participant design would prove to be the most successful in terms of emotional resonance. This was because it was a jointly designed art piece that implemented the opinions of both parties - myself and some participants. I found it a real challenge to generate ideas by myself, however communicating with participants meant that I could get some contribution. Some of the feedback I had prior to designing this was that he thought "art/design resonates emotion when it connects with you on a personal level. When it means something more. It links to deeper ideas. It questions and challenges you. In this intellectual way it moves and stirs a reaction, a feeling and therefore emotion. But on another level art displays it's beauty through all the components like colour, medium and composition. It should give you a sense of what that figure in the painting is feeling, or feel the power of dynamic abstract paintings that convey movement or still life paintings that tell a story through what objects are focused on and their composition." This process involved engaging with the task along with the support of my peers and synergizing our thoughts into one. The participants were very helpful along the way as they considered many factors before giving their opinions. We had to first address what sort of topic we would focus on, and an idea was landscapes. They felt that I should flow towards more the positive feelings, and thus listed a list of techniques I would use to convey the positive spectrum of emotions. I play around with lighting and also the medium (3D modeling programs) as a unique approach to this and then photoshopped it to create this outcome. This was a very time demanding task as it required working in different programs and testing a range of alternative design techniques.
Hybridized Art Design
The hybridized design overall was not a bad attempt although it gave off mixed and unknown messages and feelings. I guess I was too direct in the sense that I focused on a message rather than an emotion- to distinguish the two, messages can be complex due to the reason that they can be interpreted in several different ways. This focuses on geometrical form and organic form, the combination of both but not exactly infused with one another. The idea was to show through metaphoric symbolism that even if we have two sides to us, if we try to change ourselves its, you cannot hide feelings deep down. Again this was a very specific message, however I was hoping it would evoke some sort of meaning for viewers. |
Results
So the primary question was did I evoke emotional resonance/psychological change through my work? Nothing is simply black and white. I did achieve emotional resonance through my work most prominent in my personally produced work and participant based work, however not so much with the hybridized art design.
The reason why the personal and participant based work had an effect was because first and foremost it was relatable. This meant that the work engaged the cognitive aspect of the participants was definitely engaged and therefore was able to trigger a stronger emotional outcome. I could see the logic as people are likely to react to things they understand or have experienced rather than something that is extremely foreign and unknown.
The other reason is that with relative comparison between the personal and participant to the hybridized design was that they were mroe colourful. This reflected that the majority of participants reacted more towards distinctive tonal changes, rather than super simplified black and colours (literally almost black and white). This is not to say that black and white cannot be affective, however rather I did not apply with a strong topic of design to support it. This is supported by one of the participants idea of art design with emotion: "Mostly to me I believe art and design is a form of communication and meaning medium. As every art and design may have a motive or an feeling behind it whether it is 6 year old drawing of her/himself or Da Vinci- everything we create always will have this impression of the creators desire and feelings within it.
The participant then goes on to explain that despite this "the problem is how public are the creators of the impression in the work as all of them have meaning but it depends on us as the public and whether we can understand it." This brings me to the conclusion that I failed to develop a solid perception and meaning behind the last piece of art- perhaps I over complicated my thoughts and lacked skill to enforce the ideas I wanted to.
The reason why the personal and participant based work had an effect was because first and foremost it was relatable. This meant that the work engaged the cognitive aspect of the participants was definitely engaged and therefore was able to trigger a stronger emotional outcome. I could see the logic as people are likely to react to things they understand or have experienced rather than something that is extremely foreign and unknown.
The other reason is that with relative comparison between the personal and participant to the hybridized design was that they were mroe colourful. This reflected that the majority of participants reacted more towards distinctive tonal changes, rather than super simplified black and colours (literally almost black and white). This is not to say that black and white cannot be affective, however rather I did not apply with a strong topic of design to support it. This is supported by one of the participants idea of art design with emotion: "Mostly to me I believe art and design is a form of communication and meaning medium. As every art and design may have a motive or an feeling behind it whether it is 6 year old drawing of her/himself or Da Vinci- everything we create always will have this impression of the creators desire and feelings within it.
The participant then goes on to explain that despite this "the problem is how public are the creators of the impression in the work as all of them have meaning but it depends on us as the public and whether we can understand it." This brings me to the conclusion that I failed to develop a solid perception and meaning behind the last piece of art- perhaps I over complicated my thoughts and lacked skill to enforce the ideas I wanted to.
Overall I could tell from my tele chart of 20 people that I surveyed, my personal design and participant design were most affective. Out of 40 possible points 0 for no emotional resonance, 1 for some and 2 for yes definitely emotional resonance:
We can see there is clear distinction from the results. While the top two results are relatively close and based off general feedback I can see that (since art and design is subjective in itself) it comes down to whether people can relate to and understand what they see, as one participant did say it was a way of 'communicating.' What I analysed from the results and the emotional outcome that I was curious to see, was that people are often biased towards what they think is attractive. Donald Norman's words "attractive things work better" was possibly a very significant reason as to why people were slightly more responsive to my personal design than the participant based one. This seems a little ironic and I thought the participant based design would have the most response, however I made sure to not have the participants and those I surveyed the same people so there would be no bias. |
Conclusion
This brings to attention what makes a general difference in conveying emotion, and what makes a design even 'more' emotionally resonant. From what I gathered it was the execution of skill that caused bias, but also the fact that it was the most relatable out of all of them. This would suggest that particularly with this group of surveyed people it is unlikely they would respond to extremely abstract art (with deliberate intention to evoke emotion) than art that is straight forward and recognizable. Participants told me that in my personal design it clearly shows a human being, and also an action that is common to most humans- "we have all had our moments where we day dream, we think or simply procrastinate" it essentially visualizing someone experiencing emotion itself, "This could not be more explicit."
Due to the nature of this project, because I decided to focus on a reflection at the end, I would say I learnt the most at the end rather than throughout the process. However with this said, I was able to reflect on my methods and approaches to the designs and at no point in time was there an entirely linear line of work- there was a lot of changes implemented in my designs and reworking required to get the results that I and my peers wanted.
Though I did not originally have this specific methodology stated in my proposal, I found that after the lack of clarity in the proposal needed to be revamped in my work for this assignment. I needed to take initiative and change the workflow accordingly.
I am satisfied with my outcome and the two pieces of work that were a success as they clearly distinguished for me, what makes an emotional piece of art, at least on a basic level. I really enjoyed with others and though it proved to be very time consuming, it has been a beneficial experiment.
If I wanted to get more accurate results I would test this on a larger scale (more participants), cover a fixed set of emotions, art styles and more mediums next time (to engage more of the human senses and relatability to the object/design).
Due to the nature of this project, because I decided to focus on a reflection at the end, I would say I learnt the most at the end rather than throughout the process. However with this said, I was able to reflect on my methods and approaches to the designs and at no point in time was there an entirely linear line of work- there was a lot of changes implemented in my designs and reworking required to get the results that I and my peers wanted.
Though I did not originally have this specific methodology stated in my proposal, I found that after the lack of clarity in the proposal needed to be revamped in my work for this assignment. I needed to take initiative and change the workflow accordingly.
I am satisfied with my outcome and the two pieces of work that were a success as they clearly distinguished for me, what makes an emotional piece of art, at least on a basic level. I really enjoyed with others and though it proved to be very time consuming, it has been a beneficial experiment.
If I wanted to get more accurate results I would test this on a larger scale (more participants), cover a fixed set of emotions, art styles and more mediums next time (to engage more of the human senses and relatability to the object/design).