Love for Inanimate Objects: A Model to Understand Relationships Between People and Products

In this paper, the concept of relationship-based product personalities was applied to develop a model which gives a better understanding of emotional relationships between people and products. This paper presents extant literature on models suggested for the design of emotional experiences. Emerging from the literature, the Ego State Product-Person Relationship model was developed. The model shows that when a person interacts with an object, the product evokes emotions and creates emotional experiences and the user attributes a particular personality to the product depending on the emotions evoked by it. To validate the usefulness of the model, 15 co-discovery sessions were conducted. Participants were prompted by a list of product categories and five lists of personality categories, and assigned personalities to products, explaining their experiences of those products. Applying this model to analyse five types of products, as examples, shows that the suggested model could assist designers to further understand and design towards preferred emotional experiences.