Why You Should Take Googly Eyes More Seriously
Opening Remarks From A Budding Designer
Here we are: my first blog after graduating from my user experience design bootcamp. Finally I'm able to bridge the gap between my thoughts and the written word.
This blog would primarily be about design thinking, drawing from certain philosophies in how we perceive the world, as well as displaying my progress as a designer and design researcher!
So what's the topic of the day?
Mr. Potato Head.
The massively successful humanization and commercialization of a vegetable. You may be laughing right now and thinking to yourself how ridiculous it is that someone pasted seemingly random features on a potato, the most uninspiring member of the root family. But the team who designed and created the toy followed a pretty common law of psychology: we like things that remind us of ourselves.
There are exceptions to this rule such the uncanny valley images proliferating among internet forums. For those unfamiliar, the uncanny valley in psychology refers to the point at which something becomes unfamiliar: that we cannot mark it on the graph of human to nonhuman and results unsettle us.
One of the reasons why we view Mr. Potato Head as a boyish vegetable and Creepy Pasta posts as nightmare fuel lies in what they remind us of. Not so much the human part. An image can have the look but not always the essence of a person.
Recently, as I was redesigning my portfolio website, I chose to implement a follow-cursor hover feature for the menu button to give a little charm to the site. My main line of reasoning for this decision was because it looked like a little head looking at the cursor and I thought it was kind of cute.
Having studied psychology in school, I stopped and considered: Hey! There's why this works! I'm not just fooling around!
This phenomenon: anthropomorphism pervades every aspect of our lives from angry ketchup bottles at dinner to Pixar animated films. We perceive the world in a human-centric way; we always bring it back to ourselves.
This is important to keep in mind especially concerning interaction design as we try to convey real events and objects into symbols without losing their meaning. Anthropomorphism in design can add a level of play that can improve interactivity, boost positivity on the platform, and help with brand perception.