Categories: design, graduate school, learning

Yesterday, I received in the mail Emotional Design by Don Norman. One section in the book I found intriguing (which may not be a big surprise for some of you) is that positive emotions are critical to learning, curiosity, and creative thought and today research is heading toward this dimension.

Taken from a paragraph in the book, a psychologist named Alice Isen have shown that being happy broadens the thought process and facilitates creative thinking. Isen discovered that when people were asked to solve difficult problems, ones that required unusual “out of the box” thinking - they did much better when they had been given a small gift - not much of a gift, but enough to make them feel good. When you feel good, Isen discovered you are better at brainstorming and examining multiple alternatives. And it doesn’t take much to make people feel good. All Isen had to do was ask people to watch a few minutes of comedy film or receive a small bag of candy.

So this got me thinking about my Human-Computer Interaction Design class and about my professor, Marty Siegel’s, unique teaching style. A teaching style that I never been accustomed to before. Normally in the beginning of class discussions, a short music composition or a video that relates to the art of sound and design. As many of the graduate students can recall in last nights class, we didn’t have the pleasure to experience either one. Not until Basey gave us an impressive impromptu vocal performance. We all became aware of this missing element in the beginning of the class. In my case, I knew it had some positive effect.

At first, I thought all his stuff was to bring our spirits up after working long hours on projects, but I realize its more than that. Its starting to make sense to me on how this class was intentionally structured. The small gifts we may not realize - the magic points (a form of extra credit), the positive and social functions with mentors, the 5 minutes before the beginning of discussion… Marty is incorporating the formula: Gifts = Happiness = Creative Thinking. In the end, he is reinforcing our emotions positively to promote creative learning and to cultivate our creative thought process.