Testing the Usability of Guidelines for the Design of Surprising Products

Abstract

The paper introduces guidelines to support designers to generate ideas for the development of surprising products. The guidelines are structured coherently with the concept of sensory incongruity and the Function-Behaviour-Structure framework to create a mismatch between previously conceived expectations and product features. The usability of the interactive presentation is checked with an experiment that involved more than 30 subjects with a background in product design (mechanical engineers and industrial designers), which demonstrated to be capable of generating ideas using the same.

Personalising the unexpected: Preliminary suggestions for synaesthetic-oriented design

“…They created a positive surprise due to the incongruity and not matching of expectations. Whilst there is little research into designing technological products with surprising elements (Gross and Silvennoinen, 2014) there are guidelines into designing surprising interactions for non-technological products (such as Raafat and Becattini, 2022) which could help to inspire future synaesthetic-oriented work. P17's reaction to the synaesthetic-oriented elements also suggests that people may learn how to adjust to synaesthetic-oriented combinations over time even if the initial reaction was negative.…”