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Abstract
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
product, whereas they are confused by and have negative opinions towards
inappropriate incongruities.
This paper reports the design and the evaluation of products in two catego
ries (rubber duckies and deodorants), with (in)appropriate sensory incon
gruities of three types: visual-tactual, visual-olfactory and visual-auditory.
Participants evaluated the level of surprise felt and the intensity of resulting
emotions. They also indicated their overall liking for the products.
Both appropriate and inappropriate incongruities were evaluated as sur
prising as well as confusing. As expected, appropriate incongruities evoked
more amusement and were generally favored. Whereas products with visualtactual incongruities showed large differences in ratings on liking and amuse
ment between appropriate and inappropriate incongruities, these differences
were smaller for products with visual-auditory and visual-olfactory incongrui
ties. Possibly, the appropriateness of an incongruity is more conspicuous when
it is brought about by a conflict between touch and vision than when olfaction
or audition are involved.
Keywords: incongruity, senses, sensory metaphor, surprise, amusement, confu
sion, humor, product design, design.
09331719/12/00250285
Walter de Gruyter
2. Design of products
To design the 12 products, several steps were taken. To ascertain that the final
products were appropriate for our purposes, several test products were made
during the design process. These test products were evaluated by designers
working at the department of Industrial Design of Delft University of Technology. Below, we describe the design process in short.
that can directly influence the first three attributes: form, material, use
motions and effects. Furthermore, we included two attributes describing the
product itself: nature and name, and three attributes describing the products relation to other products: environment, used with and similar to.
The first branching lists items and concepts directly related to the product.
This branching will not contain any possibilities for incongruity. When branching out to additional layers, further associations will be made that are less obviously related to the product. If the designer can incorporate properties of one
of these distant associations into the product, the result will be an appropriate
incongruity that can be related back to the product. This incongruity could then
be amusing to the user, assuming the incongruity is not too obvious and the
user is able to make the connection.
IA
IA
A
Auditory
Olfactory
Olfactory
IA
A
Olfactory
Olfactory
Auditory
Auditory
IA
A
IA
Auditory
Tactual
Tactual
IA
A
Tactual
Tactual
A/IA*
Almond
Mint
Maraca
Bell
Off-balanced
Massage ball
Wood
Baby lotion
Farting
Metal clank
Hard body
Vibrating
Test Product
Honey
Same
Same
Same
Heavy
Vibrating
Same
Banana
Same
Same
Same
Same
Final
Product
Deodorant
Ducky
Modality
Final
Manipulation
3. Experiment
The products described in Table 1 were created as working prototypes. Including a control product without manipulations, there are seven versions of each
product (deodorant and ducky) that all look the same, but sound, feel and smell
Figure 3. Strength of connections of selected appropriate incongruities for ducky and deodorant
with the original products.
differently. We added one extra control product to each product set to prevent
participants from expecting only surprises when evaluating the products.
The products were evaluated in six focus groups of eight participants each.
Using focus groups in the evaluation of products ensured a lively discussion
about the products after the evaluation process. With this method, we expected
to gain more insight into participants thoughts and opinions about the different
types of products. However, by using focus groups participants were abletosee
all of the products and the reactions of other participants during the evaluation
3.1. Method
Each focus group sat at a table with eight chairs. There was one product in
front of each seat. Each product was placed on a placeholder with a letter code.
Participants were instructed to examine the product in front of them. They
were allowed to pick up the product, interact with it, and explore it through
their senses, but they were not allowed to take the product apart. For each
product, they filled out a questionnaire.
The questions for each product were similar, but differed slightly (see below).
They concerned the level of surprise felt (This ducky/deodorant is surprising), deviations from expectation for each sensory modality (The ducky/
deodorant felt/sounded/smelled exactly how I thought it would), intensity of
resulting emotion(s) (This ducky/deodorant is confusing; This ducky/
deodorant is amusing), their overall opinion of the product (I like this ducky/
deodorant), and of its specific sensory characteristics (I like the scent/feel/
sound of this ducky/deodorant). This last question differed per type of stim
ulus: we only asked about the manipulated sensory characteristic. For example, for the products manipulated on sound we asked about the pleasantness of
the sound. For one of the control products we asked about sound and for the
other one we asked about scent and feel. All questions were rated on a sevenpoint Likert scale with end points disagree strongly to agree strongly. The
order of the questions differed between products within each questionnaire.
After two minutes during which they filled out the questionnaire, participants
placed the product back onto its placeholder, and changed seats to examine the
next product. This repeated until all participants experienced all eight products.
In each focus group products were presented in a different order.
After the group reviewed the set of products, they discussed the entire set.
The experimenter led the discussion on the basis of the following questions:
sounds as expected
smells as expected
Ducky
Control
Tactual Appropriate
Tactual Inappropriate
Auditory Appropriate
Auditory Inappropriate
Olfactory Appropriate
Olfactory Inappropriate
5.8
2.3*
1.7*
4.4
4.4
5.5
5.6
5.3
1.8*
1.8*
1.9*
1.8*
5.2
5.8
5.2
5.2
5.2
5.0
4.9
1.8*
2.7*
Deodorant
Control
Tactual Appropriate
Tactual Inappropriate
Auditory Appropriate
Auditory Inappropriate
Olfactory Appropriate
Olfactory Inappropriate
5.0
1.7*
2.0*
4.4
4.0
4.6
4.9
5.7
2.0*
5.6
2.5*
2.5*
5.6
5.5
5.1
4.7
4.7
4.9
4.9
1.8*
1.5*
3.2. Results
Results will be discussed in four sections. The first section discusses the
manipulation check. The subsequent two sections focus on differences in peoples reactions to (1) visual-tactual, visual-auditory and visual-olfactory incongruities; and (2) appropriate incongruities and inappropriate incongruities. The
last section discusses peoples opinions as expressed in the discussion part of
the focus group sessions.
3.2.1. Manipulation check. One-tailed t-tests were carried out on the questions asking about deviations from expectations in order to test whether mean
ratings were significantly lower than the centre of the scale. Generally, Table 2
shows that we succeeded in manipulating the desired sensory characteristics
(the ratings in bold). However, for some products, the manipulation in one
sensory characteristic caused unanticipated experiences towards other sensory
characteristics. Specifically, manipulations in tactual characteristics sometimes
changed the auditory characteristics. We see this for the tactual appropriate and
the tactual inappropriate ducky and for the tactual appropriate deodorant.
Figure 4. Mean ratings on overall liking per Manipulated sensory incongruity and per (In)ap
propriateness for duckies and deodorants.
Changes in tactual characteristics generally imply a change in material characteristics, which can also affect sound properties. Furthermore, the vibrations
that were used in the tactual manipulations naturally produced a sound. As our
results will show later on, these unanticipated changes in sound properties for
tactually manipulated products did not directly interfere with our other analyses.
3.2.2. Interactions between sensory modalities and (in)appropriateness.
For both the duckies and the deodorants, the ANOVAs with surprise, overall
liking, amusement or confusion as dependent variables, and Manipulated sensory modality and (In)appropriateness as factors showed interaction effects for
overall liking (F[2,276]=13.9 and F[2,274]=3.5, all p<0.05) and amusement (F[2,276]=11.8 and F[2,274]=10.6, all p<0.05), but not for surprise
and confusion (p>0.20). Figure 4 shows the interaction effect we found for
overall liking. The interaction effect we found for amusement follows a similar
pattern (data not shown). In Figure 4 we see that differences in mean liking
ratings between products with appropriate and inappropriate incongruities are
larger in size for the products that were manipulated in touch and (to a lesser
extent) smell, than for the products that were manipulated in sound.
We further compared responses to tactual, auditory and olfactory incongru
ities by evaluating the liking ratings for specific sensory characteristics (I like
the scent/feel/sound of this product) (see Table 3). While designing our products, we focused on creating the same average level of pleasantness for all
manipulations. For both duckies and deodorants, the control products (the
unaltered products) rated average (35) on all three sensory characteristics.
However, our analyses showed some interesting deviations for the manipulated
like sound
like smell
Ducky
Control stimuli
Appropriate stimuli
Inappropriate stimuli
4.9a
4.8a
2.4b
4.5a
2.8b
2.8b
3.5
4.5
3.8
Deodorant
Control stimuli
Appropriate stimuli
Inappropriate stimuli
4.4a
4.2a
2.7b
3.4
4.7
4.5
4.1a
3.7a
1.7b
a,bMeans
with different superscripts were significantly different in vertical comparisons, p < 0.05.
Inappropriate N=72
Appropriate N=72
F-value
Ducky
Surprise
Confusion
Amusement
Overall liking
2.5a
2.1a
3.9ab
4.3b
4.6b
3.6b
3.6a
3.6a
4.4b
3.6b
4.4b
4.3b
26.7**
16.4**
4.5*
4.2*
Deodorant
Surprise
Confusion
Amusement
Overall liking
2.5a
2.3a
2.3a
4.1a
4.4b
3.8b
3.1b
3.1b
5.2c
4.1b
4.5c
4.1a
35.7**
16.7**
25.7**
7.5**
a,b,cratings
4. Discussion
The present study had a somewhat explorative character. Although our
manipulation check shows that we succeeded in manipulating the desired characteristics in the creation of products, we did not in all cases succeed to completely separate manipulations between the senses. Consequently, some of the
results need to be interpreted with caution. Nonetheless, our approach shows
how designers can systematically design surprising products that evoke amusement: using association maps allows designers to explore less obvious routes
to create amusing incongruities.
Note
Corresponding author: Geke Ludden (g.d.s.ludden@utwente.nl)
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