The Emotional Resonance of Design
Building Artifacts of the Future
Good Products Work. Great Products Create Meaning.
The best products do two things at once. They work, and they make you feel something worth keeping.
This is not new. Since the beginning, people have made things that carry more than function. Painted pottery in Greece. Swords in Japan. Family heirlooms in any home. These objects are vessels for memory and identity. They connect people across time. More importantly, these artifacts were used for their function on a daily basis. The phone in your pocket is part of the same story.
If you design products, this is your job. Not only to make something that solves a problem, but to make something that matters to the person using it.
What Objects Really Do
Artifacts are not neutral. A piece of jewelry once signaled power and beauty. The Rosetta Stone thrilled scholars because it unlocked a language. The Apollo 11 Lunar Module became a symbol of human ambition. In many communities, every object carried a story. That is why people keep things that are not always strictly useful. The meaning attached to them is the value.
Modern products can do this too. The MacBook you love is not just fast and useful. It feels right in the hand, sounds right when you click, and opens with a smooth motion you start to look forward to. Small details become rituals. Rituals become attachment.
A Simple Model for Feeling based on Existing Frameworks
Don Norman described three levels of design in Emotional Design (2005):
Visceral: What it looks and feels like in the first second (Sensory).
Behavioral: How it performs at the task once you start using it (Functionality).
Reflective: What it means to own it over time (Meaning).
You need all three. If you miss one, the product is weaker.
Patrick Jordan, in Designing Pleasurable Products (2000), described four types of pleasure:
Physio-pleasure: Materials, texture, sound.
Socio-pleasure: How the product helps people connect.
Psycho-pleasure: Using the product to accomplish a task.
Ideo-pleasure: Values that show up in the product, like craft or sustainability.
Stack these and the product gets sticky and irreplaceable to the user.
Lessons from Artifacts Old and New
Look at a few cases, historical and modern:
Rosetta Stone: Visceral curiosity, a behavioral use for scholars, and a reflective symbol of discovery.
Rudraksha Mala: Tactile craft, spiritual and sentimental use, and a bridge across generations.
iPhone: Not only a device, but a coherent connector and a status object for the world.
Harley-Davidson: Transportation, plus a sense of freedom and belonging.
Different objects, same pattern. Sense, use, meaning, and people. None of this is accidental. It is the result of stacking the layers and pleasures on purpose.
How to Design for Resonance
Here is a checklist that helps in practice:
Start with context: Sit with real users and their values. Guessing is expensive.
Tell a true story: Make the reason to exist legible in the form and behavior.
Sweat the senses: Texture, weight, temperature, sound. These reach people faster than words.
Let users shape it: Small choices and modular parts turn ownership into pride.
Keep utility sharp: Emotion is not a substitute for function. It is a multiplier.
Design for groups: Products often become social objects. Plan for that.
Respect the future: Things that last and are made fairly create a quiet pride no ad can buy.
The Tradeoffs
Personalization competes with scale. Meanings shift across cultures. If you chase feeling and forget function, you lose people. If you build ethically, costs go up and you need to get creative. Treat these as constraints to design with, not excuses.
A Simple Test
If your product disappeared tomorrow, would anyone feel its absence?
If the answer is no, you made a tool.
If the answer is yes, you made an artifact.
The goal is not poetry for its own sake. It is attention. It is respect for the person on the other side (empathy). If you train yourself to see how objects shape feeling, your products will get better.