Ep# 34: Emotions: What are they good for anyway?

Emotions are central to the human experience, influencing every aspect of our personal, professional, and social lives. They are complex and multifaceted, shaping how we perceive and interact with the world. Research suggests that up to 95% of our decisions are driven by emotions, underscoring their powerful impact on our choices. 

In this episode, you will: 
• understand the definition of emotions 
• discover the role of emotions in designing solutions 
• learn about frameworks and tools to explore and navigate emotions 

Transcript

[00:00:00] Dr Dani: Hey, Peter.

[00:00:00] Designer Peter: Hello, Dani. How are you today? Good. Excited about our chat today. Me too. Looking forward to it, as ever. But this one, for some reason, especially looking forward to. 

[00:00:11] Dr Dani: Nice. So what are we talking about? 

 Today we are talking about emotions.

[00:00:17] Designer Peter: What are they good for anyway?

[00:00:18] Dr Dani: Feel like it's like a Dolly Parton song or something.

[00:00:21] Designer Peter: Could be. Over to you. You can sing us to sleep. You can do the outro. You can sing us a Dolly Parton style outro to this podcast. 

[00:00:29] Dr Dani: Okay, we're trying to build and keep our listeners, not scare them away. So I won't sing.

[00:00:37] Designer Peter: Okay, stay with us, listener. 

[00:00:39] Dr Dani: So usually we start with, , a definition. 

[00:00:43] Designer Peter: Yes, and I've been thinking about this episode for a few days and I definitely think we should start with the definition. Let's anchor it in something. 

[00:00:51] Dr Dani: Okay. What do we mean when we say emotion?

[00:00:58] Designer Peter: I'm hoping that's a [00:01:00] rhetorical question and you're going to tell us. With a ready made definition. I'm half joking about it, but I guess there's so many, one of these things that's so many different. Okay. perceptions and models and definitions of. So yeah, let's choose one and start with it. 

[00:01:14] Dr Dani: Yeah. So I will say, when we study humans, emotions are one of the hardest things to study.

[00:01:22] Dr Dani: And if you've ever done any research or took a class or read anything on emotions, you'll that. So I guess a very simple definition of emotions is it's a mental reaction. Like I said very simple definition. It's usually subjective. So our emotions, so my emotions, are my reaction to something.

[00:01:49] Dr Dani: Your emotions are your reaction to something. And we can both have, we can both be on a roller coaster or we can [00:02:00] both share an experience of any kind and have very different reactions. 

[00:02:05] Designer Peter: Yeah, simple and basic to start with.

[00:02:07] Designer Peter: That's a good, that's a, that's really helpful. 

[00:02:10] Dr Dani: Now, where it gets a little bit complicated is Already. Already. I always get asked, okay, so then, if that's a reaction, so then what are the reactions? And you start looking at, okay, so what are the different emotions that people can have? And this is where it gets a little bit dicey.

[00:02:30] Dr Dani: Paul Ekman's work is probably the oldest or more concrete. What he talks about is the six basic emotions. And which are sadness, anger, fear, happiness, surprise, and disgust. Then there's another model. I can never say this person's name correctly. Robert Fletchick.

[00:02:59] Dr Dani: And [00:03:00] he introduced eight primary emotions and he talks about these emotions happening in opposing pairs. So every, what he says is okay. So there's really four emotions or four classes of emotions. And they've got. At opposite to them. So four pairs. So what he talks about is joy and sadness, fear and anger, anticipation and surprise, disgust and trust.

[00:03:28] Dr Dani: And in his framework, what he says is joy is about feeling connected, where as sadness is about being withdrawn. When we feel fear, we get small and hide away. When we feel anger, we're big and loud. When we have, when we anticipate something, we lean in and try to look at it closely when we're surprised it's more like a jumping backwards.

[00:03:54] Dr Dani: And then disgust is about rejection. Whereas trust is [00:04:00] about embracing. So if you can think about it, these are really about coming in, moving out, pulling away, pulling apart or pulling away, coming close kind of things. 

[00:04:08] Designer Peter: Yeah. That yeah, that was really apparent in the descriptions and the labels are really visceral descriptions.

[00:04:14] Dr Dani: And then in 2017, I believe it was . There was a study done. I forget the name of the university. I want to say it was Berkeley University. Apologies if I've gotten that wrong.

[00:04:28] Dr Dani: That actually, this study came out and said, actually, there's 27 distinct categories of emotion. 

[00:04:35] Designer Peter: Wow. 

[00:04:36] Dr Dani: And we won't go into that because this is not really about what are all the emotions, but I sharing this to go. That it's a topic that's being studied, but it's a very complicated topic and there's different views and perspectives.

[00:04:52] Dr Dani: So if you think about it, even within ourselves, sometimes we struggle to [00:05:00] understand our own emotions. 

[00:05:01] Designer Peter: Yes, definitely. And if nothing else, all these different models are a step towards helping us do that. 

[00:05:08] Dr Dani: I quite, if I had to pick a favorite, I quite like the eight primary emotions because it talks about the opposite.

[00:05:17] Dr Dani: So it's very easy to go, am I feeling this or this? That's just a, that's the one that I tend to gravitate towards for that again. 

[00:05:26] Designer Peter: Yeah. Jumping way ahead. I'll come back to what I was about to say there at the end, but Rob, I had a quick look up Robert, it says Robert Plutchik, P L U T C H I C K, I think, is that right?

[00:05:39] Designer Peter: Yeah, P L U T C H I K, not C K yeah. And yeah the idea that they're opposing appeals to me a, as does the kind of the descriptions of how, how they're embodied, how what you might actually physically be doing. Yeah. Deal. I love both of those things.

[00:05:55] Designer Peter: Okay. Yeah, 27 I, yeah, I guess there's. Lots of [00:06:00] different granularity we could go into, but like you say that's not really what we're going to talk about today is more. 

[00:06:05] Dr Dani: Look, I think there's, and I think the more and more research that comes out about emotions is probably going to be a lot more, but I think what's important is I don't know that most of us as adults can even identify ourselves, the emotions that we're having On a, on the eight framework.

[00:06:25] Designer Peter: Yeah. Yeah. And actually funny you should say, I think I read somewhere recently that the average person in a a research study that was done. And I think it was America and, thousands of adults and the average number of emotions that people kind of use to label how they were feeling during an average day was, I think it was either between three and five.

[00:06:45] Designer Peter: Yeah. If you like, the kind of emotional vocabulary of our average adult is about, three to five words. And I think, angry, sad, happy were the three most common [00:07:00] ones. 

[00:07:01] Dr Dani: Sometimes we're even having an emotion and we're not even aware we're having an emotion. 

[00:07:06] Designer Peter: Okay.

[00:07:09] Dr Dani: That happens a lot. 

[00:07:10] Designer Peter: At all? Would never be aware of it or we're aware of it, but 

[00:07:14] Dr Dani: do you think that you're always aware of what your emotion is in every moment? 

[00:07:21] Designer Peter: I'd have to say no, because I'm not fully aware of, wow, this is going off on a philosophical deeper meaningful tangent, isn't it?

[00:07:27] Designer Peter: No is the short answer to that. Yeah. And so I agree. So that makes sense. 

[00:07:32] Dr Dani: This is why things like self awareness, self reflection really come into play, right? Because sometimes we have an emotion and we behave according to that emotion, but we're not always cognizant that we have the emotion and that's why we're behaving in that way.

[00:07:50] Designer Peter: Yeah, okay. So we might guess if we do pause and reflect and become self aware in the moment, we might realize we're having a. We're behaving in a certain way [00:08:00] and then start to think why is that and find our way and some sort of chain back to the emotion that we experienced. Yeah.

[00:08:06] Designer Peter: Okay. Yeah. So that makes sense. Okay. So we have a definition, we've gone into the complexity of emotions what else? We're. Talking about what are they good for anyway. So it's do we get into the why of emotions? However many there are, however many different labels we have, what, why do we, Dr.

[00:08:25] Designer Peter: Dani, why do we humans experience emotions? I was going to say have emotions. I'm not sure if they're the same thing. 

[00:08:32] Dr Dani: Why do we have emotions? Do we want to talk about why do we have them or why are they important? 

[00:08:37] Designer Peter: Let's go with why they're important to begin with. 

[00:08:41] Dr Dani: This is a podcast about design thinking. Yes. And design. Design and emotions are very interlinked. We design for emotion. We talk about, needs and pain points and needs and pain points are really about emotions.

[00:08:55] Dr Dani: When a need is not met, we have an emotion. When I'm [00:09:00] trying to do something and it doesn't work, I get angry. 

[00:09:03] Designer Peter: Yeah. And of course the opposite is true. If we try to do something and it does work, then I become happy. 

[00:09:09] Dr Dani: Why these are important. So why? So one as design thinkers, we care about emotions because it's very much aligned to why we do the work we do.

[00:09:19] Dr Dani: Anyway, the other reason is different. Studies say different things, but about seven somewhere between 70 and 95 percent of decisions are made based on emotion.

[00:09:33] Designer Peter: 70 and 95%. So that based on emotion rather than most of us probably think that we're making a lot more than five to 30% of our decisions based on rational, logical thinking with emotion removed from it. So that's quite a surprising percentage to hear for when you hear it for the first time.

[00:09:54] Dr Dani: I find this this one is probably one of my favorite things when I started studying this stuff, because I [00:10:00] remember being a young intern and, like you get mentored and all of this stuff when you're a young intern and the big things at the time was like, there's no place for emotion in business and you got to leave your emotions at the door.

[00:10:14] Dr Dani: Yeah. And I always thought this was like, I always found this a little bit silly, as a young intern, you smile and nod. And then I got to the point where I started to really question it, but like humans, we have emotions. It's so intrinsic to who we are. And then you look at something like so much of our decision making is emotional.

[00:10:35] Dr Dani: So if we leave emotion at the door, one, I don't think that's possible. I don't think as humans, we can fully eliminate emotions from decisions. We just have to accept they're going to come into it. Yes. The best that we can do is have awareness. 

[00:10:51] Designer Peter: And I think even if you are able to temporarily remove emotions from a decision, then as soon as you remove that emotion embargo, [00:11:00] if you like, then all of a sudden those emotions I'm going to come back in and you quite possibly going to change or change potentially, or at least regret the decision that you made once you bring the emotional ends.

[00:11:11] Designer Peter: That's an interesting story. I have exactly the same experience when I was the equivalent of a young intern. I was on a development program and my mentor I can still hear him telling me to take the emotion out of it, take the emotion out of it. And likewise, I could not understand Ironically, the logic of of doing that.

[00:11:27] Designer Peter: I thought it was logic at the time. And here we are. 

[00:11:31] Dr Dani: In my view, short of a lobotomy, I don't know how you would do that. Now the thing is, but we have been for so long, I think probably from the time of the industrial revolution, had this mentality that we have to take emotions out of decision making.

[00:11:47] Designer Peter: Yeah. 

[00:11:48] Dr Dani: And so we've come to be a society that believes that we make decisions on facts. Yeah. Yeah. And, I think to some degree we [00:12:00] consider facts when we make decisions. We're not making them, them blind of facts. evidence, consider evidence. But a lot of our decision making is emotionally driven.

[00:12:14] Dr Dani: And there's even research that suggests that when we make decisions out of emotions we tend to be happier with them longer. This doesn't apply to all, we can make rash, negative decisions, but there is some suggestion that it would some decision making decisions that are emotionally driven tend to have higher satisfaction.

[00:12:38] Designer Peter: Interesting. 

[00:12:39] Dr Dani: To bring you a good, concrete example, let's say you got two job offers and one, paid a lot more money. It was a higher level position had very tangible things and clearly the front runner, if you look at it from a data perspective and the other [00:13:00] job didn't, it paid well, but not, not the same amount maybe the title wasn't as prestigious, but That company had a lot more growth potential.

[00:13:11] Dr Dani: You met some of the people that you're going to be working with every day and you feel like that was a good fit. You really like the leader you're going to be working for. They do more interesting work. You'll have more flexibility. And which, you can go with the pure numbers and make that decision.

[00:13:30] Dr Dani: Or you can go with the, I feel this is a better fit. So if you look at that example which do you think is going to make you happier in the long run? 

[00:13:40] Designer Peter: Yeah, of course it would. I assume it could be, hopefully it's not a trick question, but I assume that the second one where, you're feeling more of a connection to the boss and the colleagues and there's more development opportunities, et cetera.

[00:13:53] Designer Peter: Okay, 70 to 95%. Wow. Okay. Yeah, as [00:14:00] you mentioned it before design, designing for emotion. I think we always, you said we always are, and I agree with that, but we're not always Yes, I don't think we're always intentional enough about designing for emotion. I think we, we could, we should always be paying attention to what are the emotions somebody's going to be what somebody's experiencing now before we design.

[00:14:26] Designer Peter: And then what are they going to be, what are they going to be feeling? What emotions are they going to be experiencing? After we design and they start experiencing or using the product, service, et cetera, that we've we've used.

[00:14:37] Designer Peter: I think for me, the using emotion and kind of labeling specific emotions and specific, moments of, let's say a service can be a really powerful tool to Imagine and then set an intent around do we want, sometimes we might intentionally aim to have people feel indifferent about a particular moment in a service or [00:15:00] experience because indifference means that they're, or maybe satisfaction, that's a better word, it's a mere satisfaction, but what I mean by that is They don't always need to be feeling delighted or excited or enthusiastic or ebullient or any of these, positive, energetic emotions.

[00:15:15] Designer Peter: We get, we might actually want them to feel a neutral emotion. But by, starting to bring in emotions and labels for emotions, it helps us think through what we need to do to actually give our user the best chance of experiencing that emotion. Use those words carefully because, there's only so much we can do for, to help.

[00:15:41] Designer Peter: As you said, emotions are subjective, so we can't automatically make somebody experience guarantee someone will experience a specific emotion. I don't think I could be wrong. 

[00:15:51] Dr Dani: No, we're not we're designers, we're not master puppeteers or anything, right? At a minimum, what we could think about [00:16:00] is, have we designed something in a way that's going to evoke negative emotion?

[00:16:06] Dr Dani: Have we made this so difficult that people are just going to get angry? Yeah, think about sometimes when I have to call a contact center, I am convinced they make that the contact centers are designed to make me angry. So I hang up and don't follow through.

[00:16:23] Designer Peter: Okay. 

[00:16:24] Dr Dani: Or things like return processes. I'm convinced that some of those things, whether intentionally or not are designed so that I attempt to do it. I get angry and I'm like, you know what? That 30 I spent is probably worth more to me just to let it go and not try to return it. Cause it's going to take me 10 hours to figure out how to return it.

[00:16:46] Designer Peter: Yes. Yeah, I started my career in call centers, so I know for a fact that actually both of those things are true. They could be in some cases, they're definitely designed to, It would be more challenging to accomplish something because the company, it's cheaper for the company [00:17:00] for you to do it elsewhere.

[00:17:02] Designer Peter: When it's not designed to do that and it's accidentally a bad experience, then in the end it actually costs the company more money because you just call over and over again to try and get the problem solved. Returns is an interesting one. You maybe think of Zappos who did the opposite to making returns difficult and actually built it into their business model and spent all their money on making that as simple and easy as possible and providing amazing support instead of spending on on marketing and became a billion dollar business.

[00:17:32] Designer Peter: And I guess maybe that's how important emotions are.

[00:17:35] Dr Dani: Absolutely. I don't know if you've ever been a Zappos customer. I was a big Zappos customer when I lived in the States. And it was, honestly, one of the reasons I shopped there is because I knew if I didn't like it, returning it would be so easy. It was sometimes easier returning it, something I bought online through Zappos than at a store.

[00:17:55] Designer Peter: Yeah. No, I didn't. I've never had the opportunity to be a Zappos customer, but I've heard [00:18:00] lots of stories just like yours. Love it. 

[00:18:03] Dr Dani: Zappos if you're listening, come to New Zealand, we've got two customers, 

[00:18:07] Designer Peter: yeah, it's a start.

[00:18:09] Designer Peter: Where are we at in our chat, Dani? I wasn't intending that to be a mic drop moment, but didn't mean us to arrive there so soon. But so we talked about the definition of emotions the plot check model Talked about, start to talk about why emotions are important in relation to design thinking.

[00:18:27] Designer Peter: We've been talking about I think of using emotions as a almost like a tool to bring into design conversations and design activities to guide us and also to help us understand whether our design is meeting the needs of the people we're designing for. 

[00:18:44] Dr Dani: And it's also why we do the empathy work, right?

[00:18:48] Dr Dani: So if we do empathy work and we start to diagram what are people feeling, what are people thinking, feeling, doing, hearing, seeing, that all has to do with [00:19:00] emotion. Because we're trying to understand, what is the emotional state of the people that we want to design solutions for so that we're giving them the experience that they desire.

[00:19:13] Designer Peter: Here's a question related to something we talked about briefly earlier. Do we always want customers to be, or users and the people we're designing for, to be aware of that emotional state?

[00:19:25] Dr Dani: Do we want them to be aware that we've designed it for that emotional state or that they're having that emotional response? 

[00:19:32] Designer Peter: Both actually. I was thinking of having that emotional response, but I'm interested in what you think about them being aware of that we've designed it that way. 

[00:19:41] Dr Dani: I don't know that, People aren't aware that things are designed to evoke emotion.

[00:19:47] Dr Dani: I think we talk about that enough. Now where this gets a little bit tricky is so if you're doing a commercial and we're like, by the way, this commercial was designed to make you feel [00:20:00] this way and that way, it just takes away from the experience. Or if you go to. A movie. Yeah.

[00:20:06] Dr Dani: And this movie was meant to scare the crap out of you, . Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that people do have an inkling, if you will, that something is gonna evoke a certain emotion. . If I go by flowers as a gift for somebody, I'm anticipating like, oh, grandma loves flowers.

[00:20:26] Dr Dani: I'm going to bring some flowers over. There is that. So I think we, we have an intuitive sense about that. So I don't know that we have to be explicit about it. The reason I'm hemming and hawing about it though, is because there's an there's a nefarious side to this, right? Because when we talk about designing with emotions in mind, there's lots of opportunity to be manipulative.

[00:20:49] Dr Dani: Okay. And that's where. This whole awareness thing where, when people aren't aware, lots of people are now talking about things like dark [00:21:00] patterns where you're being guilted into opting into things, like I've seen things like on, pet websites, where you can opt in and instead of saying no, thanks, it says no, I don't really love my dogs that much.

[00:21:13] Dr Dani: That's evoking an emotion. Wow. So that's where I'm a little I feel like there isn't a clear answer because there are some things where it's apparent, but it's when you get into this Manipulative acts that it starts to not sit right with me.

[00:21:31] Designer Peter: Yeah. Yeah. And this is where we start to overlap with and get into our, one of our favorite subjects, behavioral science, isn't it where, where we're not nudging.

[00:21:41] Designer Peter: And yeah, being very aware of and cautious of what we're doing and why we're doing that and how we're doing that. 

[00:21:47] Dr Dani: Nudges are very misunderstood because The ethical use of a nudge is you nudge people, but you give them a choice, right? And the choice to do it or not is equal, but you're just nudging them [00:22:00] to make that.

[00:22:01] Designer Peter: Slightly different to your pet website. Man, that's a shocker. Trying to guilt you into into let's stay on the emotions of that. So how does that make you feel, Danny, when you, maybe guilt is one of the initial emotional responses, but what else do you feel as that guilt subsides?

[00:22:19] Dr Dani: This is where having a lot of knowledge sometimes, because then I get angry because I know I'm being manipulated. Yeah. Yeah. So then I end up not, so I actually ended up not buying the thing that I would buy anyway, because now I'm just pissed off. , how dare you say I don't love my dogs?

[00:22:37] Designer Peter: I knew you were going to say that. That's why I asked you that question.

[00:22:40] Dr Dani: But here is the thing though, right? This requires a lot of self awareness on my part. And it requires me to be in tune in that transaction moment to get the hang of one. Because it could be that, maybe it was late at night I was [00:23:00] ordering something. I was feeling guilty because I've been away from my dogs because I traveled for work or I've been on, I've been on a vacation and I've just brought them home from the kennels.

[00:23:12] Dr Dani: And in that moment, I may be feeling guilty and then I'm like, oh, I better do this because, 

[00:23:17] Designer Peter: yeah and maybe here's another question about emotions then and that something, a picture is building in my mind around your kind of your emotional state I'm trying to say are our baseline emotional state, maybe changes from moment to moment.

[00:23:36] Designer Peter: So you just mentioned there, you maybe you've been away in a work trip, you come back and feeling guilty anyway, then an extra, guilty, guilt inducing piece of copy there on a website is going to amplify that existing guilt and just tip you over the And, the edge to make, to, have your mouse button clicking on that add to car button.

[00:23:56] Designer Peter: So yeah maybe what I'm trying to say there, get out there is like [00:24:00] emotions are complex, it's unusual, or we wouldn't, Rarely be feeling one emotion for an interesting question, how long might we feel a particular emotion for without any overlap or interference from any other emotion?

[00:24:11] Designer Peter: I'm gonna base it on personal experiences and say probably not particularly long amount of time before something else comes into the kind of emotional landscape or inner world. 

[00:24:21] Dr Dani: Yeah, our emotions are not static. 

[00:24:24] Designer Peter: That's why I was trying to say thanks for doing it in three words and not 300.

[00:24:32] Dr Dani: And if you think about it, so what is it? Our brains our brains process something like, I think, 11 million pieces of data a second. A second. 

[00:24:43] Designer Peter: Wow. Even a day, that's a lot of hours of, wow, 11 million.

[00:24:47] Dr Dani: And I might be off on that number, but it is a massive amount of data that we process in, in, every second.

[00:24:53] Dr Dani: So if you think about that. There's all of these things that will be triggering emotions for us, right? So it'd [00:25:00] be virtually impossible for us to have a static emotion that, that exists for long. We could, but what I mean is we can switch between Feeling happy and sad and, having the different emotions in a day.

[00:25:18] Designer Peter: Even, I was going to say, even in a kind of in a, a minute to minute timeframe, depending on what we're actually doing and being part of or experiencing.

[00:25:27] Designer Peter: Why did I go there? I think, yeah, again, just another consideration when we're designing something is to think about that that fluctuation and again, this is where our empathetic exploration becomes so important is to understand from an emotional point of view, what people are experiencing moment to moment.

[00:25:45] Dr Dani: Yep. And I think this is where the whole idea of experience design comes into place. I walk into a store and. Everything's nicely folded and organized and I walk in and it just [00:26:00] feels a certain way. My, my mood is going to be very different than if I walk into the store and there's just racks and racks and hangers and hangers and there's like stuff on the floor, there's stuff everywhere.

[00:26:14] Dr Dani: It evokes different. Emotions. . Yep. 

[00:26:19] Designer Peter: Yeah. Completely. And therefore, come back to my earlier point about, so let's say I'm walking into that store and I've just come off the street and maybe one day I've come off the street. It's south side, it's sunny, it's a nice blue sky day.

[00:26:33] Designer Peter: And I come into the kind of the chaos of that particular store. I can cope with that chaos because my kind of baseline is a higher level than let's say I come in off the street and it's been a windy, rainy day and I'm uncomfortable and, because I'm a sixth shop and all sorts of things have gone wrong and I'm at my kind of yeah, my baseline is lower.

[00:26:53] Designer Peter: So my tolerance for that chaos is, is lower. And yeah, maybe I'll just walk out again because I can't cope with [00:27:00] it. 

[00:27:00] Dr Dani: This comes back to the awareness, right? So as the consumer, like there are certain times or days of the week that I refuse to go to the supermarket. My workday has been such, or, whatever the combination of things that happen in that day, I cannot cope with going to the supermarket.

[00:27:23] Dr Dani: And I know that my emotional state is such that I can't cope with that. Yeah. From a design perspective, that's something we could be thinking about. Okay, we're going to design supermarkets. Let's think about what somebody's day has been 

[00:27:39] Dr Dani: like, and they're stopping at the supermarket at the end of the day.

[00:27:43] Dr Dani: What is an experience that we can create? So they would actually look forward to coming to the supermarket. Maybe it's the best part of their day. 

[00:27:51] Designer Peter: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Nice. And shifting it around to maybe a different couple of different domains health, for example, how might we design [00:28:00] experiences for patients of a healthcare service anticipating how they might be feeling before they, come into the hospital.

[00:28:06] Designer Peter: The health care center, for example and banking maybe looking at it from a different dimension, all the same situation to the store. But instead of coming in to buy a new pair of socks, the customers come in to sign up for a mortgage. It's actually quite important that person's in an appropriate state of mind to make one of the biggest commitments of their of their life often.

[00:28:27] Designer Peter: So how might we, acknowledge that, anticipate that, and, design something that meets them where they are and puts them in the right state of mind to to have a good memorable experience for something so important. 

[00:28:38] Dr Dani: A hospital example, I don't know if you've heard about this.

[00:28:40] Dr Dani: And I can't remember the name of the hospital, but, Little children are very much scared of MRI machines and how they reimagined what if we made it like under the sea? And it was like a whole experience. And from the time that the children like check in for their scan they make it a bit of an adventure.

[00:28:59] Dr Dani: [00:29:00] They're still getting to do all the things that medically they need to do, but it loses the clinicalness of it. And I think about, Like one of, probably one of the scariest things as a woman you have to go do is get a a mammogram. Okay. It's such a it's such a, one, it's a weird thing because, nobody wants to go hang their Body parts off of some machine.

[00:29:23] Dr Dani: But you go and you're in this hospital gown and it's just very clinical. What if you made it a spa experience? You walk in and it's like a spa and you get a robe and you get a cup of tea. And it's, so I'm sharing these as examples because we. Really be deliberate about no matter where we work, we could really be deliberate about what is that experience that we want?

[00:29:48] Dr Dani: What is that emotional state that we can help people have so that this is a good experience for them. 

[00:29:54] Designer Peter: Yeah. Love it. So the last Doug Diets, or Doug Diet, I'm not sure how you say his surname. He is the, he was the [00:30:00] engineer at at GE who created those MRI experiences for, for children, not only did the children prefer going to them and therefore, children's health improved because of it.

[00:30:11] Designer Peter: But G the profitability of those particular MRI machines, I understand, was was more than the standard ones. User benefit and business benefit there. And then the last thing you mentioned about the mammograms, that's fully in the category. Why has nobody done that yet, Danny?

[00:30:27] Designer Peter: Why not make it like a SPA experience? Question mark. Okay. A lot of All right, this is this is really great. Where are we getting to where are we getting to with our emotional, our exploration of emotions and their importance? 

[00:30:39] Dr Dani: So we talked about the what, we talked about the why we usually do what, Why, how, and we we've been talking about how, it's so looking at things that as designers really looking at what it is that we're creating and thinking about, how do we want people to feel? 

[00:30:59] Designer Peter: [00:31:00] Exactly. We embark on our empathetic exploration. We keep our empathy kind of antennae tuned in through our design process. I was going to think of a couple, there's a couple of concrete things that I like to refer to.

[00:31:13] Designer Peter: Again, it's to do with the kind of emotional vocabulary that we need to remind ourselves often and the two things are there's a emotional or a wheel of emotions which is really helpful. It can help you expand your own vocabulary and also help people you're interviewing talk more about that.

[00:31:29] Designer Peter: And then another one is the It's like a catalog of universal needs and feelings. I think that comes from a place called the Center for Nonviolent Communication originally, but both of those are really simple, almost one page tools that can just bring more awareness to what we're talking about here.

[00:31:45] Designer Peter: one more tool that I do like to use.

[00:31:47] Designer Peter: I've started using it more recently. It's the there's an awesome company called Riders on Elephants, and they have. Emotional culture deck and also a customer experience deck that almost takes a lot of the effort out of [00:32:00] thinking about this and doing it. So those are two recommendations, both of us, I think.

[00:32:05] Dr Dani: Another thing just to how to think about also is we can think about this in everyday moments. You've got little children that hate waking up in the morning, like how can we make this pleasant experience? How can we make, how can we get good emotions going in the morning, ?

[00:32:23] Dr Dani: The bad ones. Or if you're a manager, how can we make things like one to ones an enjoyable thing and not a, I gotta go talk to my boss now. There's like lots of everyday moments where we could really be purposeful and thinking about emotions. 

[00:32:40] Designer Peter: Yeah yeah, come back to what you were saying. Yeah, I think bringing awareness and asking the question that how might we be putting some emotion, emotional labels into our how might we questions. They can be game changers. Awesome. 

[00:32:55] Dr Dani: And for goodness sake, stop telling people to take emotion out of it.

[00:32:59] Dr Dani: Let's just [00:33:00] stop that as a practice, as a we're humans, we have emotions, they're okay. We need to have our emotions. And also remember that, earlier on you asked why do we have emotions and emotions actually are a very big part of why we're all still alive today. Yes. Yeah. Literally lifesavers.

[00:33:22] Dr Dani: They are, cause sometimes we forget what if some, when a car, when we're about to hit, get hit by a car, we have an emotion around that when we're in unsafe spaces, we have emotions about that and we have to listen to those things. 

[00:33:37] Designer Peter: Pay attention to them. Yeah, completely agree.

[00:33:41] Dr Dani: Okay, so then we usually then go to what are the relevant design thinking capabilities. 

[00:33:49] Designer Peter: Yeah. Yeah I've mentioned one already our empathetic exploration most definitely that one stands out, obviously yeah, what else? 

[00:33:56] Dr Dani: The other one for me is situation [00:34:00] optimizing, has a lot to do with emotions and that balancing the negatives and the positives and How do we, keep the emotions elevated in a positive space while learning all the bad stuff that's happening?

[00:34:15] Designer Peter: I may be building on that, I think, collective collaboration, because if we can tune in to understand our collaborators emotions, then we can actually more effectively, and our own, of course, then we can more effectively collaborate. 

[00:34:29] Dr Dani: Yep, absolutely. And keep in mind that empathetic exploration and collective collaboration are very much linked.

[00:34:36] Designer Peter: Nice. Nice. 

[00:34:37] Dr Dani: So what are you taking away today, Peter? 

[00:34:40] Designer Peter: I am taking away plot checks, eight opposing pairs of emotions and their kind of physical embodiments that you mentioned. I'm going to look into those and I'm really curious about that. . How about you? 

[00:34:51] Dr Dani: I'm going to go play around with some of the tools that you mentioned because I haven't really done my no, spent some time with the emotional culture deck.

[00:34:59] Dr Dani: I haven't done [00:35:00] that in a bit and honestly, even the emotional wheel, I haven't, the wheel of emotions, I haven't tinkered with that in a while, 

[00:35:08] Designer Peter: that's a nice compliment to the rollercoaster of emotions that we experience on a day to day basis, Danny. Do you like what I did there? 

[00:35:16] Dr Dani: I did. 

[00:35:18] Designer Peter: That was my mic drop. 

[00:35:20] Dr Dani: On that note. 

[00:35:22] Designer Peter: There we go. 

[00:35:22] Dr Dani: Thanks for listening, everyone. 

[00:35:24] Designer Peter: Thanks for listening, everyone. See you next time. 

[00:35:26] Dr Dani: See you next time. Bye. 

[00:35:28] Designer Peter: Bye.