Fusion between design and psychology shortlisted for the Irish Design Awards

Have you ever thought about what kind of pocket you’d want to keep your happiness in? or your sadness? These are the questions which spurred award-winning multi-disciplinary designer Jill Phillips (https://www.byjillphillips.com/designconsultant) and language expert Dr Tim Fosker (https://pure.qub.ac.uk/en/persons/tim-fosker) to design a series of interactive exhibits that incorporated elements of design and psychological research.

Using words that describe feelings, they set out to explore what it is about the design features of a pocket that makes people associate one kind of pocket with one feeling versus another. They are particularly interested in the nature of pockets as containers, and what that means when you ascribe feelings to them. To make the pockets real containers, they got people engaging with the pockets that Jill designed. People needed to place cards with feeling words printed on them into the pocket they would most like to put that feeling in. Jill and Tim have since been following up on their initial exploratory findings of associations between the shape, depth and type of closure of the pocket with feeling words, to understand what results in these specific patterns. They have been investigating if running studies online where you can’t actually put the word physically in a pocket makes a difference and whether people’s tendency to ascribe feelings to objects (anthropomorphism) also has an impact. The studies are ongoing, but the current work has been shortlisted for the Irish Design Awards under the Special Award category of Design Education and Research.

Dr Fosker said of the news…

"I’m delighted the work has been shortlisted. Working with Jill has been amazing. She is such a talented designer who is keen to challenge her own impressions of design by employing rigorous scientific study. It has been great to ask challenging questions about design with her. I’m looking forward to seeing the outcome of our follow-up studies".

The Irish Design Awards Ceremony will be held on 14th November 2024 in the RDS, Ballsbridge, Dublin.