Design for Emotion, Not Just Aesthetics: How Spatial Flow Shapes Human Behaviour

Part of our thinking series on experience design. Previously: Experience Design: The Ultimate Form of Human-Centred Design.

1. Aesthetics and emotion are not separable

When we talk about designing for emotion rather than aesthetics, the first thing to keep in mind is that the two are tied together. Look at something as simple as the aesthetics of colour, or of texture and material choice, and you are already looking at emotion you cannot see either one on its own.

Take red.

Red is intensity. Red is aggression. Red is alert: blood is being spilled, something is dying, there's an emergency. And red is also victory. Think of the brands that use it Vodacom, McDonald's, M&M's, Nintendo, Ferrari. Same colour, entirely different associations. Red for a company that attracts victory, like Ferrari, is a colour people want to be associated with.

So the question is never "is this colour beautiful?" It's "what is this colour doing?"

1.1 Where aesthetics serve behaviour

Look at Navigate World Whisky: the wood tones in the shelving and flooring, the golden wheat in the field photographed during golden hour. Do the aesthetics win there? They set a tone of warmth, craft, and origin — which is exactly the behaviour the store wants, the slow browse of someone learning about whisky.

Now look at Dischem at Melrose Arch and the yellow used throughout. It's a little softer than sunshine yellow more powdery, more of a pharmacist's yellow. And at the same time, yellow is the colour of emergency services. The eye is drawn to it, and it isn't a colour you'd necessarily expect on a pharmacy floor.

But here the aesthetic of colour is serving the behaviour of moving through the space. The yellow marks the centre where the customer gets a medical screening, a check-up questionnaire: how are you doing, how can we help, what is the best route for you? Colour is doing wayfinding, and wayfinding is doing care.

2. How flow shapes behaviour

That Dischem approach is a very different way of thinking from IKEA.

At IKEA, you don't reach out to a consultant who directs you straight to what you need for your bathroom. The behaviour demanded of you is to enter through a maze of wondrous exploration. And if you came in specifically to acquire one item, you are not getting the experience you hoped for in a sense, you're lost.

IKEA is the clearest example of how flow shapes behaviour. The store is laid out so you experience it as a set of rooms in a home, seeing multiple versions of what each room could look like in your own life. Everything in those room mock-ups is for sale, and the layout dictates that you explore every room of the house before you reach the checkout.

The Dischem example argues the opposite case: it's better to inquire first and get advice about your personal health before you make a purchase. You might discover the situation is more serious and needs a prescribed medication or that medication isn't what's required at all, and you're actually there for a superfood or a performance-enhancement product, in which case you go to that section.

Two retailers, two completely different beliefs about what the customer should do first. Both expressed as flow.

It's worth saying that IKEA is unusual here very few brands commit to a layout that explicit. Walk through Woolworths, Checkers, H&M, Chanel, or Dior and the flow isn't doing anything especially specific; the store is a container for merchandise. IKEA made a decision most retailers don't make, and whatever you feel about it as a shopper, it is a decision.

There are other deliberate flow choices worth noticing. Some brands design for exclusivity by putting the store upstairs and then have to bridge that decision, usually with a lounge or a dedicated entry point at ground level. Because the reality of a strip mall is that FMCG and smaller brands positioned upstairs get fewer visits: the trip up is simply more cumbersome. The flow decision creates the exclusivity, and then the flow decision has to solve the problem it created.

3. The emotions we design for, and what triggers them

We design deliberately for emotion, and the triggers sit inside the flow, in relation to the purpose of the store.

Take the same two examples. At IKEA you might feel a slight emotional frustration at the enforced route and at the same time, wonder, amazement, and curiosity, once you've made peace with the fact that you have to snake your way through the maze. At Dischem, the yellow info zone puts you at ease, because now you know what you're there for and what help you need, instead of being forced to search a store while unclear about how to resolve a health issue. The risk and anxiety around the issue get resolved first.

At Navigate World Whisky, the store reads as an H or a capital A you can circle the space or cut through its centre. The retail floor and the tasting room both give ample room for movement. The emotional arc is navigation for exploration, leading to consultation, leading to tasting. And at the tasting end, the flow does two jobs at once: let people visit every bottle, then reduce traffic and momentum so they find a seat, sit, relax, and enjoy the drink.

The triggers themselves are sensory:

• Contrast in colour, the shift that tells you you've entered a different zone.

• Contrast in sound , a change in the music, or simply the sound of the flooring underfoot: hardwood to tile to vinyl to epoxy.

• Contrast in light, moving from indoor to outdoor, or into a sunlit indoor space.

4. How we test flow before it's built

Three tools, in sequence.

Grey boxing. We raise early geometric shapes in the digital model so a flow is created, then look at the width and depth of that flow, the spacing, and the possible placement of SKUs. (More on this in SketchUp Before the Final Render.)

The splat. The scan shows how our design sits inside the bigger whole the reality of the world that's out there, rather than an idealised box.

Walking the model. A deliberate SketchUp animated walkthrough, an AR or VR experience through a pair of goggles, or a D5 virtual model. This works fantastically with one important caveat, which is the rest of this post.

5. When the plan is right and the built space disagrees

An example from work we did with Chat'r Experience: the FW de Klerk museum in the heart of Cape Town.

Early on we settled on a clockwise movement through the building, with each room presenting a different chapter, a different decade and within each room, a clockwise walk as well.

What was revealed later is that walking clock-like from the bottom of the room to the top brought you into contact with the passage leading to the next room before you had finished the room you were in. The visitor was required to ignore the passage for the time being, complete the full set of information panels along the wall, and only then return to the passage.

So we changed the flow. Still clockwise in spirit, but instead of running bottom to top, you go from the bottom to the middle, cross the room, continue counterclockwise back to the top, then return toward the midpoint on the opposite wall before reaching the top of the room and only at that point does the passage to the next room become visible.

Here's what makes this case interesting. We had used the virtual model and the virtual walkthrough throughout, and we still hadn't managed to demonstrate to the client why one option was better than the other.

What had convinced everyone of the original layout was the software itself. In design software, the camera moves in circles by nature. The clock-like motion past the panels wasn't a camera facing each panel perpendicularly it was one continuous circular shot around the room, implying that this is how you would visit the panels. That movement, that flow, felt entirely natural. But it was not a reliable enactment of a person actually stepping through the space.

That is where the disconnect happened. The camera was not a visitor.

In this case the fix was relatively simple change the colours and move the panels around to facilitate the optimised flow. But the lesson is bigger than the fix: a walkthrough is only as honest as the way you move the camera through it. Fly it the way a person actually walks, stops, reads, and turns or it will flatter a flow that doesn't work.

That was blog post 14. If you enjoyed it, we're continuing with a range of topics on the blog: SketchUp and Revit, why clients struggle to read plans and how we fix it, why experience design is the future of architecture, and an interview with Blaize Gibbons on Revit. We're looking forward to a series of posts that aren't themed around one technology or new development and we hope you are too.

For questions, email info@studiojdb.com.

[Experience Design (post 13) · SketchUp Before the Final Render · Navigate World Whisky