Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces

Abstract

DPPI is an International Conference that was started, at beginning of 2000 by a group of researchers active in establishing the beyond movement ,with aim to move away from a purely functional approach to usability and focus on a more experiential approach to human-product interaction. DPPI has clearly expressed, from its beginning, need for community to discuss logics and frame of usability research, as it has been developed especially during 1990s, questioning idea of products' functionality and starting reflection about how to design products and interfaces that are pleasurable to use and, at best, exciting. In many ways, evolution of concept of usability towards one of users' experience has been macro topic of DPPI along all five previous editions. How to augment products' functionality with emotional meaning? How to design users' experiences involving users' capabilities and mind frames? How to include emotions in interactions with artifacts and services? After 1990s, researches from beyond usability movement have produced contributions in area of emotional and experience design, producing tools and methods to design and measure users' emotions and experiences, providing guidelines for designers and practitioners that face difficulties to become applicable into industrial contexts where practices of considering design as an external and creative expertise to be enrolled to define shape of products still prevails.