week 3 emotional design object: Beetle bud vase

The Beetle bud vase is an example of behavioral design, it enhances the pleasure and effectiveness of the car it is built into. The vase is mounted in the middle of the dashboard, and it has been said to give you "... a warm feeling about Volkswagen and the experience of buying a Beetle." It personalizes the car, and gives you both a common feeling of being a Beetle owner while letting you choose your expression based on what you put into the vase. It "evokes positive emotion about the product". The design element incorporates a common artistic object (the vase) into a wholly differential product (an automobile).

image source: flickr Creative Commons http://farm1.static.flickr.com/87/234068684_cbe0bb45fc.jpg?v=0
credit: Captain Oblivious

week 3 emotional design object: Stanley Cup

The Stanley Cup, awarded to the winner of the National Hockey League playoffs, is an example of visceral design, concerning itself with appearances. The cup began with the smaller bowl at the top when Lord Stanley donated it in 1892 to be awarded to Canada's amateur hockey championship. As a challenge cup, it passes from one award winner to the next. Originally bought for ten guineas, it has become in the words of MasterCard "priceless". The chief design elements maximizing the emotion are the lower bands, first added in 1908, (with the cup achieving its current shape and size in 1958) and the engraved names. The competition, which allows the names of all team members of the winning team to be engraved on the cup, has converted it to the Holy Grail in some minds. The engraved names are a design element that unifies the history of the challenge.

image source: courtesy of Bob Graham

week 3 emotional design object: Windows

Microsoft's logo evokes reflective emotion and helps rationalize and intellectualize their product lineup. The multiple basic primary colors are the chief design element (introduced when RGB color monitors increased the popularity of computers) and help unify brand recognition. The red/orange and the yellow are warm colors while the blue is cool. The imagery is simple and ubiquitous. The flowing curves are the second design element, making users feel that they are progressing through the choppy seas of bits and bytes.

image source: http://www.wpclipart.com/computer/logos/windows/ms-windows_logo.png

Week 3 assignment starter

The week 3 assignment is:
Visual Blogging - emotional design
Find three examples of emotional design "objects"
Important: these must be emotional design as defined by our readings. The family _____ that you inherited from your grandfather is not acceptable. Neither is your bicycle.
Post images (photos, drawings, etc) of the objects
These objects can be physical objects, such as a watch or a pen; or they can be digital objects, such as a web page or a software interface.
Explain what is emotional in the design. (if the object is only emotional to you, but not anyone else, this is not the correct understanding of emotional design.)
The explanation should be short, 1 paragraph, and should describe the significant design elements as well as the emotion.

I'm going to go ahead and post three emotional design objects that I think qualify, then ruminate on them as the week progresses and our discussion ensues. I'll add the one paragraph explanation later in the week. I reserve the right to change the objects if it looks like my initial emotional feeling was incorrect

UPDATE 1/26/2007. I deleted the shofar from my initial week 3 selections, and substituted the VW Beetle bud vase. The shofar may emerge again as a cultural object

Stanley Cup Journey: Paris/Raleigh/Chapel Hill

My son was on a college graduation trip to Paris during games 5-7 of the 2006 Stanley Cup Finals, and listened to 'Canes broadcaster Chuck Kaiton's radio call of Game 7 at 4 am local time in a hotel room on a wireless internet connection.
'Canes captain Rod Brind'Amour is the first to raise the Cup after the Canes win game 7
I stand in the sweltering heat in my #45 jersey to watch the victory parade at the RBC center in Raleigh.









A former member of our season ticket group poses with the Stanley Cup outside the Student Union at Carolina, fall 2006

The Carolina Hurricanes run to the Stanley Cup in 2006 brought out varied reactions from those interested in the quest for hockey's Holy Grail. The pictures above show differing emotions of participants and fans before during and after the victory. The word "fan" is clearly derived from "fanatic"

The Instigator at CBC sports

Over winter break, as an offshoot of my JoMC711 class blog, I set up a blog on the 2007 NHL All-Star game, set to be be played January 24, 2007 in Dallas, which wound up being the unofficial campaign blog of write-in candidate Rory Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick eventually got over 500,000 votes, just 23,000 votes short of a starting spot. All voting was done online. On January 9, CBC Sports ran an online cartoon in its Instigator hockey cartoon series about the online campaign. The cartoon ran all across Canada earlier this week. I had downloaded it to my PC Tuesday, and uploaded it to my blog today using Picasa. The cartoon portrays the online campaign as having been run by a bunch of geeks and nerds.

Legislative Buildings in Raleigh NC

In the foreground is the State Legislative Building in Raleigh. Built in 1963, it was the first building in the United States designed exclusively for use by a state legislature. My office was in the basement from 1977 to 1979. In the left background is the Legislative Office Building (LOB) where I have worked since 1982. My office is on the fourth floor of the LOB.

second test post - fonts and colors

This will be much simpler than my first test post. I'm going to check out fonts and colors!

This line is in verdana
This line is in Georgia
This line is in arial
This line is in Times
This line is in Webdings
and finally in Lucida Grande

I find the Blogger text editor much easier to manipulate colors and fonts than Wordpress.

Gerry's first test post -- links and images

The image to the left was a photo of me taken by my son Aaron in July 2001 in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. I scanned it in and uploaded it to my Geocities account where the picture is hosted, and used the "add an image from the web" feaure of blogger to get the picture to this post. It's much too big, I'll need to edit it later! I see there is an edit image display tutorial which I will look at later.

This is my first test post for JoMC712: Visual Communication and Web Design, spring semester 2007 at UNC-Chapel Hill. For Weeks 1 & 2 we are to create 2 test postings. This test post will have a link, and an image linked from the web (without using Picasa, I'll get to that later in the assignments for this week! In my second test post I will play around with fonts and colors. For JoMC711 last semester I had a class blog and as an offshoot of one of my posts, did a blog on NHL all-star game voting. Both those blogs were done in Wordpress, so I'm hoping the transition to Blogger will be smooth.