The Evolution of Ergonomics into a Marketing Issue

Ergonomics, which is an important part of design, extends across all aspects of human activity today. It constitutes a common field among the physical, cognitive, social, organizational and environmental factors. From this point of view, the relationship between emotion and design can be examined among cognitive issues for cognition is concerned with mental processes such as perception, memory and reasoning. These elements of cognitive science affect interactions among humans, between humans and products or environment.
When we overview the evolution of ergonomics in design, we can see that basic functionality was the most important issue of all in the beginning. Then usability became as another important factor. And gradually usability has turned out to be an ordinary element of design. Now the new challenge is that users who are get used to interact with usable products want to have more; not only usable tools that supply functional benefits, but also products that people can emotionally interact with. Not only designers think about the emotion factor, but also do the people who work in the marketing field. Marketing authorities are trying to make us perceive products with emotions as if they express ourselves politically, sexually, in terms of status and class because they are displays of our identities. Why do people want to purchase such kind of products? Do they really look for something extra? What is the trigger to make people think that they are in need of those products? First of all, someone needs to convince us that we must posses products with emotions because of our new needs. Being convinced to possess those products brings out the emergence of use-value which automatically refers to an exchange-value. Therefore companies seek new differences for their commodities to make the old ones seem out of date, in lack of use etc. The new trend for this situation is emotionally designed products- products that are not merely tools, but also emotional beings that people interact with. This appears to be the new dynamic of consumer culture.

Starting out from the above mentioned point of view, this paper aims to examine a historical perspective on emotion and design within a critical scope.