10. Emotional Design: Discovering Emotions Across Cars’ Morphologies

The primary focus behind the overall design involves shifting from a designer-centric concept to a user-centric one. In essence, cars are utilitarian from an engineering point of view and symbolic-emotional from a social point of view. The modern car retains a strong social position and also generates vivid emotions. The tellability of a car is the priority when communicating with a customer. As a result, this paper proposes a computational approach towards studying the relationship between car morphology and the aforementioned produced emotions. Emotions are considered self-measurable and physiologically distinct. Each car is thus self-evaluated emotionally by a panel of potential users. The results of this study allege that cars can be differentiated in terms of emotions. The computing results show that a dominant trend in car style reflects the production of a group of emotions that we called power. These emotions are classified as (a) dynamism, (b) aggressivity, and (c) powerfulness, and are associated with those of (d) elegance and (e) modernity. Two groups of cars mostly correspond to a single emotion: friendly or stable. Finally, a group of cars is characterized by neutrality. It is also important for the designer to be able to foresee changes in style; and if possible, a designer must be able to explain them while considering the emotions produced in time and within context. A possible explanation is that the relationship between a car’s style and its environment tends to be orchestrated and designed as a team. A car’s style can be influenced by both the physical and social environment, and, in turn, impact these environments.