With the drastic improvement of living conditions, the satisfaction of human primary needs has become easier, less meaningful, and less rewarding. This phenomenon led people to aim towards the satisfaction of higher needs, called Supra-Functional, lin...
With the drastic improvement of living conditions, the satisfaction of human primary needs has become easier, less meaningful, and less rewarding. This phenomenon led people to aim towards the satisfaction of higher needs, called Supra-Functional, linked to experiences, emotions, self-realization, knowledge, and socio-cultural meanings.
From this perspective, designing for the contemporary scenario means to go beyond offering simple functional performances, but rather to focus on bringing richness, valuable experiences, and enjoyment in users’ daily life.
The Purpose of this research is to design supra-functional products able to generate unexpected experiences by employing norm deviations rules derived from rhetoric studies.
This Research investigates, first, the principles of unexpected experiences and how they emotionally affect human response; second, it analyses the fundamentals of supra-functional design and the directions for designing unexpected products. Third, the Research investigates the possibility to break common expectation for accomplishing unexpected results by applying rhetorical stylistic rules when conceptualizing and designing products.
The designs developed during these studies present unexpected features, focus on supra-functional needs, and aim to provide pleasant surprise or uncommon experiences to users.
In particular, the First Dissertation Projects, focus on exploring how to apply rhetoric rules in the design process and how to compose products based on Figures of Speech, while for the Second Dissertation Projects, the focus shifts from the rhetoric-designing method on to the purpose of conceptualizing products that deviate from the standard expectations, and, once the deviations are defined, designing the outputs by following the pertinent rhetorical rules. Finally, the focal point of the Third Dissertation Projects lies in enhancing the unpredictability of the outputs by following several surprise strategies for designing unpredictable experiences while employing rhetorical methods relevant to those specific purposes.
In conclusion, this Study shows a direction about how contemporary designers could go beyond the mere functional features of products, giving prominence, instead, to the supra-functional aspects of designs, aiming to turn users' ordinary into a meaningful and memorable extraordinary.