I was in the paper store with James the other day and as I started picking out neutral shades he joked, ‘What, are you afraid of color?‘ Well, yes, a little. I have a hard time picking palettes from scratch, I just have no training there. The blue he picked out made me happy.

When I read about the discussion of emotions in the design community, I wonder how far that will go. Is raising the awareness of emotions & design enough to get the people in charge of products to work differently? Is enlightening them on how to design for emotion all that’s needed?

In many of the companies I’ve worked with people are comfortable with style, but scared of emotions. Especially in politically-correct, lawsuit-prone America, it’s often safer to wring out the emotions and play it safe. And it’s rather difficult to encourage a creative process that embeds emotions in a product when only a small subset of emotions are allowed in the workplace. I suspect we’ll need to do more than just raise awareness, though it’s a great start.