I have in this project studied the area of personalized design as a way to create stronger bounds between artifacts and user. The way we relate to what we surround us with is important when we want to expose our personalities and tell who we really are. Today, in a world of mass-production, design and production seldom occurs at the same place. It feels like we are gliding away from the way we were connected to our things in the past. When we needed new cupboards for the kitchen, we went to the local carpenter and let him design and produce what we needed. The clothes were brought from travelling vendors, produced in the village or made by someone in your family, often with self-made yarn from the family farm’s sheep. We often had a connection to what we owned in another way than today. People knew exactly where their possessions came from, what material had been used and where that material had grown.I have within this project investigated how to create that personal connection to an artifact and adapt it to the contemporary. To achieve this I have looked into the different kinds of invisible information that our bodies contain. Information that is produced by numerous processes all the time, which we may not think about. I’ve been studying how people react when their inner processes are visualized through usage tests, exhibitions and finally interviews. The result is a concept I call Emotional Artifacts. The concept is describing how the idea of personalized fashion can be realized. A prototype has been built to show some of the possibilities with this kind of design that, with certain rules and ground sets, is generated by the user and later applied to different media.

Arbetet har genomförts med målet att skapa ett mervärde för Sony Ericssons produkter, utan att fokusera på telefoner. Vi har undersökt hur man kan öka användarens band till en teknologisk produkt som man alltid bär med sig. Vi har, genom att anordna en workshop, studerat användare och deras attityd gällande personalisering av mobiltelefoner. Vidare har vi besökt Milano och Berlin, och studerat hur mobiltelefoner kommuniceras hos återförsäljare och hur de används, för att få ett globalt perspektiv. Studierna har resulterat i att vi funnit en brist i hur personliga teknologier svarar mot människors känslor. Vi har baserat på detta skapat ett koncept vi kallar Selectíf som innebär en serie riktlinjer, eller kriterier för att skapa tillbehör till mobiltelefoner. Dessa tillbehör skall ta större hänsyn till emotionella aspekter och fokusera mindre på att vara funktions orienterade. Selectíf-produkter sätter känslorna i främsta rummet och skapar därmed ett mervärde baserat på emotionella band. / We have in this thesis studied the area of emotive design as a way to create a stronger user experience. Functionality and features are still important to break new grounds and develop artifacts that can make our life easier, but the value of the product must beconsidered in a new way and communicated on new level, an emotional level.We have within the thesis, in collaboration with Sony Ericsson,investigated how emotions can be evoked by personal technologies.The human computer interaction is today so advanced that we might not always reflect over the impact the technology has on us. Our personal technology is getting more sophisticated which could allow stronger emotional bonds between the user and a device. What we have created is a concept for designing what we call emotional triggers.To find out what triggers users’ emotions towards technologyin order to create an added value, we have studied the relationshipbetween users and their mobile phones. These studies included a workshop where we aimed to find out how users perceive their mobile phone and also how willing they are to personalize it.Furthermore we conducted trend research in Berlin and Milan to see international differences in mobile usage and also tocompare it to other industries such as the fashion industry.The result is a concept we call Selectíf. The concept is a set of design criteria for designing add-ons that are made to illustratemore emotional values of a technical device. The concept is based on the notion of a series of add-ons and we have also createda first prototype, called Selectíf no1 based on the criteria.The prototype focuses less on technology and more on a user’s emotional needs and illuminates how personal technologies canbe designed to be more emotive and thereby create a stronger user experience.