Pamela Pavliscak

The author of Emotionally Intelligent Design firmly believes in a future with feeling. Here Pamela Pavliscak explains how we can make technology more human and explores both its benefits and dangers

- Oliver Lindberg

Our lives are becoming more and more intertwined with technology. But there’s something missing: emotional intelligence. For example, our smartphones don’t know if we are having a good day or a bad day. As Pamela Pavliscak, founder of insights and innovation studio Change Sciences, puts it: “Technology is developing more IQ but it lacks EQ.”

Pavliscak has made it her mission to help organizations create emotionally resonant and durable products and services. To raise awareness of this oft-neglected emotional aspect and get us to rethink the way we build products, she has just written a book called Emotionally Intelligent Design, which introduces a new approach to design that will lead to more empathic technology.

“I define emotionally intelligent design as design that recognizes and respects human emotion, blending human and machine intelligence,” Pavliscak explains. “Emotion is under the surface of all technology, which is really fascinating. It mediates our relationship with other people and helps us express ourselves in various ways, whether that’s through emojis, GIFs or vocabulary. Technology is affecting how we feel and think and design has to acknowledge that.”

Emotion has become a bit of a blind spot in design, Pavliscak argues. We might do some research and uncover a usability problem but we don’t tend to analyze the emotions that feed that interaction. There are a lot of ways technology is inadvertently changing our emotional lives, too.