Thesis proposal

overview
Everyday people live using many different objects. Some of these objects survive while others get to landfills. Also, there are few of these that people remember through all their lives long and tend to keep. However, designers should be aware of the effects of having all these products that they design and then get discarded. Wasting materials, labors, and time for making new products that will not last for long time is a crucial concern to me as a designer.

emotions
First, first impressions touch our hearts then our minds. Emotional affects varies between people but there are similarities at the same time. According to Oxford dictionary, emotion means “ A strong feeling deriving from one’s circumstances, mood, or relationships with others; Instinctive or intuitive feeling as distinguished from reasoning or knowledge”. Don Norman, the Director of the Design Lab at the University of California, stated in his book Emotional Design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things, that emotions and specially positive ones increase the person imagination and creativity. Connecting these happy feelings to a product would improve its chance to survive for a longer period with the user without getting to waste. Recently, emotional design is getting more and more attention from designers who are really care about the end user and the end environment.

furniture
People own many kinds of furniture in different spaces. Furniture is one of the objects witch people deal with daily. Between home, office, or retails, People interact, use, and live with furniture. Some furniture pieces age for a long time from context to context, while others do not. These different actions contain massive people emotions that reflect either positively or negatively on the user environment and the universe. This user-product experience is one the most interesting relations that I want, as designer, to improve.

connections
Building this connection between the user and furniture is very tricky. It contains many different and hard decisions for the designer. Buying new furniture pieces for many times through years is not always the right thing to do. Aged furniture keeps memories, attachments, relations with every inch of it. The way furniture ,at the mean time, has lack of emotional connection between the user and his/her own furniture. People move from place to place and may or may not keep their furniture with them.   

The objective of my research is:
-To explore the connection between the user and his emotions toward certain objects and how these objects become the most favorable to the user from an early age and maintain its favorableness.  
-To study the emotional design perspective in designing furniture specially dining\ kitchen table.
-To study the sustainable and environmental aspects of the emotional connection to products.
-To design an collection of furniture that has a long lifespan.