Black Box: Facilitating Tool for Testing, Using Neuroimaging to Support Research in Design and Emotion

This paper presents a tool developed for testing user interaction with 3D printed abstract shapes and collecting data from brain processing. Human perceptual mechanisms allow users to establish an interaction relationship with any artifact. This occurs because part of our perceptual system seeks information, while the other part seeks meanings, in this sense this study resorts to neuroimaging as a potential mapping against the understanding of the meanings attributed by our brain to the forms and objects with which we interact. In this context, the designer, as a designer and researcher, approaches emotion, aiming to build holistic products where the interaction with the user responds not only to the pragmatic issues of functionality and usability, but also to the constitution of meanings. The exercise of emotion evaluation through neuroimaging almost always resorts to the use of 2D images, limiting the use of other stimuli, which can be tested on 3D objects from a trilogy of interactions – visual, tactile and acoustic – with the user. In this experiment, the Wireless EEG was used, adapting the existing evaluation protocols, considering specific requirements for haptic evaluation. For this purpose, an artifact (Black Box, controlled by light periods) was designed to trigger “trigger” moments during the use of the objects, synchronizing the different evaluation mechanisms. This box also allowed minimizing dispersing stimuli by canceling distracting elements in the focus of the evaluation object. Finally, this article aims to identify the main advantages and disadvantages between the evaluation protocols recurrently used and the evaluation proposal adapted with the introduction of a Black Box and the use of wireless EEG, in the evaluation of tangible and intangible three-dimensional products.