The role of emotions in ‘ongoing’ product design decisions

Research shows that emotions influence design creativity at the initial stages of the new product development process. However, little is known about how emotions influence ongoing design changes, i.e. incremental design refinements at later stages after the initial commercialisation of a product. In this work we investigate this overlooked issue and analyse how emotions might affect ongoing product design decisions. We use a simulation model that represents ongoing design as a complex problem-solving task in which product developers use customers’ evaluations of product attributes to implement incremental design modifications. In our analysis, emotions influence the effectiveness of design by causing biases in product developers’ assessments of customers’ evaluations. We show that for the case of complex products, product developers experiencing positive emotions find better design solutions than those that assess customer information in a negative or emotionally neutral way.