Doll's Emotional Design Research

Doll is a very old toy, most of the kids like to play dolls,human or animal figure of the toy can be called dolls. and there is more and more adults addicted to doll in recent times. The Popular Cartoon Culture is rooted in the mind of modern people after comic, animation, television, internet, video game become popular, the product of these productions such as doll, more of them are named as figure nowadays, had become famous and prevalent by people. There are several of types of doll, the preference of a person to a doll is affected by the culture, age range, gender, personality and background of him or her. A person’s emotion is always reflected onto the doll when playing it and the major purpose of a doll is to satisfy the Psychological needs of a person.Emotional design is one of the most popular theories in psychology of design in recent days, it covered the aspect of design and psychology. Emotional design concerns the emotional experience of a person, it studies about how a person use a product, the different emotional experience between people from different background when using a product, and studies about the psychological needs. Emotional design helps to design a. product that as in good functional and popular with "Human-centered" as its principle.Doll product is very close related to emotional design, as doll can be recognized as the earliest product designed with the theories of emotional design. This dissertation introduces the relationship between dolls and human, the development of doll product is the epitome of human society, civilization and technology.This dissertation also introduce the psychological characteristic between Infants, Toddlers, Preschool, Childhood, Adolescence, Young Adults, Middle Adulthood and Seniors people, and studies the preferences to doll between different age range and gender. People have physiological needs, such as safety needs, appreciation needs, self-fulfilling needs, and different kind of doll satisfy each of these needs. This dissertation study how a person’s preference to doll is affected by emotion by researching the psychological projection of unconscious, empathy, Compensating for emotional and Lolita complex.The most famous doll products are designed in USA, Japan and Hong Kong, they introduced all type of dolls, and covered the market of every age range, satisfying different preferences and demand of different people. But the doll product designed in China is still limited within the market of young children, and it ignored the market of adults. Most of the doll in China is imitating the design of foreigners, lack of the creativity and characteristics of its locality.This dissertation introduce the attraction of a doll to human of its outlook and functional structure, and give recommendations of the shortcomings and deficiencies of the doll products in China, from the perspective of Emotion design, studying the emotion of different group of people by combining the features of a doll; By referencing the outstanding doll design around the world.