Measuring the Emotions Elicited by Office Chairs

Office chair designers have traditionally focused their design efforts on optimizing the so-called 'ergonomic fit.' Although the effort to design chairs that support physical comfort is commendable, the focus on ergonomics neglects the possible impact of emotional responses on the general experience of comfort. The general experience of comfort experienced when using a chair is not only influenced by the ergonomic fit but also by the 'emotional fit,' i.e. an emotional response that is desired by the user. In this paper, a study is reported that was designed to measure emotional responses evoked by office chair appearance. The study was part of a bigger project concerning attractive and comfortable office chairs. The emotional responses evoked by 15 chairs were measured with the Emocard method, a non-verbal self-report instrument. Some differences were found in the results obtained with the Emocards and those obtained with a standard verbal evaluation method. Although discriminative to some extent, the non-verbal method was found to be less discriminative than the verbal method. In the discussion section, some recommendations for the development of the Emocard method are reported. It is discussed that, given these feasible recommendations, the Emocard method can be a useful tool for office chair designers that want to 'design for an emotional fit'