Paul Hekkert

Delft University of Technology | TU · Department of Industrial Design

Personal technology plays an integral role in shaping people’s quality of life which includes leisure and tourism experiences. A number of personal informatics tools can support people in performing their activities by collecting biometric and environmental data; however, little is known regarding the use of psychological data to enrich leisure and...

This study explores how technology-mediated journaling can support memorable and meaningful tourism experiences (MMEs). The digital photo is the most common medium for travelers to keep a record of memorable and meaningful moments and share them via social media. We explore the potential of using these footprints for travelers to connect the implic...

Ob aufgrund der Finanzkrise, der öffentlichen Wahrnehmung eines massiven Überkonsums oder des globalen Klimawandels, immer mehr Designer*innen sind bestrebt, ‚der Gesellschaft etwas Gutes zu tun‘. Dieses Interesse scheint sich vor allem auf zwei Weisen zu manifestieren. Zum einen übernehmen Designer*innen und Designunternehmen bei der Produktentwic...

Within the scope of Design for Sustainable Behaviour, the connection between behavioural change strategies and design idea generation has received limited attention. This paper highlights metaphorical thinking in product design to stimulate sustainable behaviour. In particular, the current study proposes a metaphor-based design method to guide desi...

Personal technologies are widely used to capture the memorable and meaningful experiences travellers have during their journeys. These digital footprints serve as memorabilia for travellers to share and reminiscence about these special experiences. This study showcases an exploratory study of the creation of a travel diary from the traveller’s digi...

Research in positive psychology indicates that sustained well-being is more determined by our actions than by our possessions. Products' contribution to well-being may thus be grounded in their potential to support well-being-enhancing activities rather than in their material value. In a laddering study, we investigated how products shape a range o...

Esthetic principles describe the levels or combination of design dimensions that are esthetically appreciated. Current principles focus on dimensions connected to product design itself (e.g., unity and variety) or dimensions that refer to a product design's relationship to other product designs (e.g., typicality and novelty). However, product desig...

Over the last two decades, constructive design research (CDR) - more commonly called Research through Design within HCI - has become an accepted mode of scholarly inquiry within the design research community. It has been described as having three distinct genres: lab, field, and showroom. The lab and field genres typically take a pragmatic stance a...

In this study we test the Unified Model of Aesthetics (Hekkert, 2014), which posits that the aesthetic sense has evolved to identify and value prospects for safety and accomplishment. The principles of unity-in-variety, most-advanced-yet-acceptable and autonomous-yet-connected are considered manifestations of these conflicting urges at separate lev...

This research experimentally investigates whether Unity-in- Variety can account for the aesthetic appreciation of websites. In a first study we designed two sets of web pages, differing in layout style and content, to systematically and independently vary on both unity and variety via the design factors contrast and symmetry (for unity) and dissimi...

There is a lack of consistency regarding the scales used to measure aesthetic pleasure within design. They are often chosen ad hoc or adopted from other research fields without being validated for designed artifacts. Moreover, many scales do not measure aesthetic pleasure in isolation, but instead include its determinants (e.g., novelty). Therefore...

Many people strive for a life characterized by self-growth and meaning, considered to be innate needs, by actualizing their authentic potentials during their lifespans. Positive psychology (PP) has termed this self-development process as eudaimonia—to live a virtuous life. From this perspective, such a life can be attained by individuals through cu...

Over the last decade, design for behaviour change has become increasingly recognised as a strategy for enabling social change. Despite this, we are far from understanding its implementation, especially through the private and public sectors. This study has surveyed private and public sector stakeholders with regard to their current knowledge of, an...

Theory and discourse suggest that the aesthetic appreciation of a wide range of artifacts—including works of art and consumer products—is partially governed by the principle of maximum effect for minimum means (MEMM). We conducted two studies to find experimental evidence of this principle in the context of product design. In Study 1, we tested the...

The study reported in this paper describes the evaluation of the Social Implication Design (SID) method. This effect-driven design method aims to support designers in designing the influence of design manifestations on behaviour in order to counteract social issues. To study the effectiveness of the method, both a multiple-case study with designers...

The emergence of smart materials has urged design education to keep up and take part in introducing them to design students. There has been a great deal of work on teaching conventional materials like wood, metal and polymers in product design. Yet when it comes to learning smart materials, the sources are very limited. Our research group in Delft...

Unity-in-variety is considered to be one of the oldest-known universal principles of beauty. However, little empirical research exists on how unity and variety together influence aesthetic appreciation. In three studies we investigated how unity and variety predict the aesthetic appreciation of a range of product designs, and further assessed wheth...

The aesthetic judgment of an artifact is usually interpreted as an assessment of the artifact's sensory properties. But an artifact can also be appreciated, and still aesthetically, for the way it fulfills its purpose. Existing design theory does not provide the concepts required for describing this aspect of aesthetic appreciation and so cannot fu...

Aesthetic appreciation affects the success of products in a number of areas, such as user satisfaction and usability. Hence, designers apply aesthetic principles to create more successful products. However, it is still unclear how such principles apply to the services and systems that products are often part of. In this paper, we explore how two ae...

Products are typically aesthetically appreciated using multiple of our senses. However, studying the aspects that influence multi-sensory product aesthetics is complicated because of the interaction of visual and tactile product properties, such as form and material, which underlie the aesthetic experience. Illustrated by our ongoing study on the t...

Products result from processes that are guided by designers’ intentions for what the products should be, what they should be like and what they should do. People might infer these intentions more or less accurately from the products’ form, or they might learn about them from a variety of sources such as advertisements and other marketing materials....

Metaphors are not only a powerful tool in the hands of a poet; they are also powerful in the hands of a designer. In this paper we examine (1) several intentions behind metaphor conception and selection, and (2) consider various ways a product metaphor can be designed. Whereas both classifications emphasise the enormous potential metaphors have, we...

This study investigates the potential of an eTourism platform that can enable one’s flourishing life. Over the last few decades, information and communication technology (ICT) has served as back-end management system that contributes to the prosperous growth of the tourism industry; however, this role has been questioned in the era of pervasive tec...

This paper probes into the ongoing situation of designing with under-developed materials, in particular a computational composite. In response to the urge for more integral material-product development, we see that designers are increasingly asked to valorize new technology-push materials in the early stages of their development. In this paper, we...

Product aesthetics are widely recognized as a valuable marketing tool (e.g., special issue in Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2010; Whitfield & Slatter, 1979; Bloch, 1995; Schmitt and Simonson, 1997; Veryzer & Hutchinson, 1998; Miller & Adler, 2003). As a result, several design principles have been identified that can be used to design products tha...

In this chapter we demonstrate that contemporary design methodology provides methods for design for moral values. Subsequently, we explore the methodological challenges and problems that this brings to the table. First, we show that contemporary design methods are aimed at realizing values of users and society. These values are in general not moral...

In the summer of 2012, I was in the fortunate position of acting as technical advisor to a major European automotive manufacturer. My job was to evaluate over thirty new interior design concepts on their experiential qualities and address the following question Will future customers appreciate these solutions? Solutions indeed, as almost all of the...

In this paper, we investigate the interplay between unity-variety, and novelty-typicality in relation to the beauty experienced in the movements performed while interacting with a product. We conducted a study that explored how these factors affect the aesthetic pleasure elicited from interaction. Results showed that novelty and typicality jointly...

Design is a significant driver of behavioural change, enabling, encouraging or discouraging particular practices from taking place. Already, approaches derived from the concept have enabled us to recycle, heat more efficiently, increase our exercise patterns and change the way we think about interaction, along with many more examples besides. Despi...

Designers have increasingly used the capacity of design to influence human behavior and consequently to address the challenges that our society faces. One of these challenges is the rise of 'lifestyle diseases', such as obesity and diabetes. A change towards a more healthy lifestyle could in many cases prevent or diminish such diseases, which would...

In the product-design domain, metaphors are used as a means of communication between designers and users. A designer generates a metaphor by deciding on a quality of a target to highlight and selecting a corresponding source that conveys this quality; the user interprets the designer’s intentions via the end product. The depth of the generated meta...

Design is a significant driver of behavioural change, enabling, encouraging or discouraging particular practices from taking place. Already, approaches derived from the concept have enabled us to recycle, heat more efficiently, increase our exercise patterns and change the way we think about interaction, along with many more examples besides. Despi...

The principle of unity-in-variety has recently been shown to affect visual aesthetic appreciation of product designs. We investigated whether this principle can also account for tactile aesthetic appreciation of products. Design students rated nine car keys on unity, variety and aesthetic appreciation through tactile exploration only. Results revea...

To generate a product metaphor, designers have to come up with a metaphorical association between a target and a source, and then apply this association to physical form. In this article, we address the interplay between novelty and understandability of a metaphorical association, and subtlety and identifiability of metaphor application, via two st...

To generate a product metaphor, designers must select a source, discern a property (or properties) of this source, and transfer this property to the product they design. The selection of any source in particular is affected by the extent to which it represents the meaning the designer intends to convey (i.e., its salience), and the strength of its...

Although there is evidence that people's response to an artistic or literary work can be affected by information about the work, there is still much to learn about the way people judge artifacts aesthetically when they know the intentions by which the artifacts have been designed. In this paper, we share the insights that we have gained into this t...

Human-computer interaction and holistic user experiences are considered crucial concepts in the design of interactive products, where interactive self-service kiosks require special attention, as they are different than any other type of consumer and personal products. The public nature of self-service kiosks suggests that social context may have a...

In order to contain risks and increase the profitability of innovation efforts, firms frequently engage in joint innovation activities with external sources of knowledge such as design consultancies. Innovation literature has given limited consideration to the strategic role that design consultancies can play in the innovation efforts of their clie...

In this chapter we demonstrate that contemporary design methodology provides methods for design for moral values. Subsequently, we explore the methodological challenges and problems that this brings to the table. First, we show that contemporary design methods are aimed at realizing values of users and society. These values are in general not moral...

If you aim to design a particular user experience, the material properties of the object may play a decisive role in being successful. Would the lightweight car door give you the proper impression of a luxury car? And does a perfectly polished doorknob feel natural? Maybe not. Materials can feel artificial, sound reliable, and (can make a product)...

Product designers can use a wide range of design principles to influence the appearance of new product designs. One of these principles, 'unity-in-variety', states that product designs combining a maximum of unity or order with as much variety as possible are the most aesthetically pleasing. Even though designers are thought to intuitively use the...

This one-day workshop brings together HCI scholars and practitioners who share a common interest in understanding and exploring how we will be socially connected in the future. Central to our discussion will be the exploration of an interdisciplinary research agenda in social interaction design (SxD) that merges social networks and socially generat...

After a review of the tools available for the measurement of emotion in product design, we discuss several problems specific to the measurement of user experience during interaction with products are describe and approach to address them. This approach uses a video-supported interview technique (self-confrontation) to collect moment-to-moment data...

The 18th academic conference hosted by the Design Management Institute (DMI) of Boston, Mass., attracted a greater number of papers than any previous conference. The event was intended to highlight the importance of the contribution of design to organisational effectiveness and success, particularly in the ways that it can improve the new product d...

The purpose of this paper is to increase our understanding of how insights in conflicting concerns can be used as an approach to design for subjective well-being. This is done through examining qualities of a conflict experience across three life domains: food, procrastination, and safe sex. Ten participants from various age groups and backgrounds...

When people encounter products with visual-tactual incongruities, they are likely to be surprised because the product feels different than expected. In this paper, we investigate (1) the relationship between surprise and the overall liking of the products, (2) the emotions associated with surprise, and (3) the long-term effects of surprise. We crea...

The primary objectives of this study were to identify a set of journals that report on industrial design research and to propose quality rankings of those journals. Based on an online survey, design journals were assessed in terms of two quality metrics: popularity and indexed average rank position. We find that both general and specialized design...

When information from two or more sensory modalities conflicts, this can evoke a surprise reaction as well as feelings of amusement, interest, confusion or disappointment. In concurrence to joke theory, we argue that people appreciate and enjoy appropriate incongruities that can be related back to the product, whereas they are confused by and have...

When information from two or more sensory modalities conflicts, this can evoke a surprise reaction as well as feelings of amusement, interest, confusion or disappointment. In concurrence to joke theory, we argue that people appre­ ciate and enjoy appropriate incongruities that can be related back to the p roduct, whereas they are confused by and ha...

Information processing and connectivity are fundamentally changing the capabilities of a product. Products can have "feelings" and, by expressing them, they can affect the experience and the behavior of people. We explore the implications of social dynamics between products and we show how the potentially negative behavioral pattern of addiction ca...

Noisiness is an important product experience that is not restricted to the auditory properties of products; bright colors and cluttered visual patterns can also be experienced as noisy. The aim of this study was to determine to what extent the overall product noisiness is attributed to the sounds that the products make and to what extent is it attr...

In this paper we examine if love for products can be said to exist, and investigate how it can be studied. We collected real-life stories about products people love in order to understand the experience of love for products. Participants described their love for products as a very rewarding, long-term and dynamic experience that arises from relatio...

Sometimes, the way in which we interact with products implicitly communicates how we feel. Based on previous studies on how emotions can be detected and communicated via product interaction, we discuss how an interactive product could influence affect by responding and changing behaviors expressing affect. We discuss the proposal of the affective f...

Control errors often occur in repetitive and monotonous tasks, such as manual assembly tasks. Much research has been done in the area of human error identification; however, most existing systems focus solely on the prediction of errors, not on increasing worker accuracy. The current study examines force responses before, during and after errors in...

In selecting a material to create an intended product meaning, several factors, such as the material's sensorial and technical properties, the product in which the material is embodied, and who the user is, may need to be taken into consideration. Each factor consists of a number of aspects (e.g., user covers aspects including gender, expertise, cu...

There are several tools used in materials selection processes by designers. However, they are mostly engineering based tools, which are dominated by numerical (or technical) material data that is mostly of use in embodiment or detailed design phases of new product development. On the other hand, product designers consider certain aspects such as pr...