answer to classmate's question:how important is emotion in HCI

This is the same kind of question about when aesthetics is important in a design. I believe that this kind of questions always depend on the design. In Maya Lin’s memorial design, memorial is a kind of media to express human’s emotion. Emotion is a big part of music design too. But it would be very hard to design the emotion part in a serial of diving actions for Olympic competition.

When we talk about “Human-Centered Design”, I believe that it includes all the designs in our whole world. This is the human being’s society. Everything we designed, are designing and will design is for human use. Although sometimes we see something as a bad design, but we cannot deny that the bad design sometimes is welcome by some people. One difference between good design and bad design is that good design is in favor of larger group of people than bad design. In different design field, Architecture, music, dance, there are different factors involved. Human Centered design is not in the same taxonomy with them. I remember a word, but I forgot who said it:” if you want to design for all the people, you are designing for nobody.” Then why do we try to discuss all designs together if they are doomed to be different?

I believe that our goal to learn different designs belong to different subjects is not learn the designs in a fast way, but find out all the possible factors which maybe matter in our design. It doesn’t matter about what our design is, website, artifact, or others. We know we should think about functionality, aesthetics, emotions, complexity, laws, time limitation, budget… In our further works, we know where we should begin with after we get a design problem, what kinds of method or process we can chose.