Nowadays, design isn’t just there to make things “look cool”. You must make the consumer feel and interact with the product and have some kind of emotional attachment to your product. Recently, there has been studies showing that if a design has properties that give the user emotions, it is considered successful. Here are a few examples.
I know many of you have “sold-out” and bought an IPOD and conform to Apple’s interface. Don’t you get annoyed when you see a scratch on the plastic or see a fingerprint on the nice shiny metal casing on the back? Well Apple intentionally designed it that way. The IPOD begs to be caressed and cared for. If you are like me, I like to keep my stuff pristine, so I go out an d buy a case for it and protect my investment. There is a reason why the edges are rounded, unlike the 1st generation of ipods where the edges were as rough as a cheese grater. The IPOD was emotionally designed to invoke a user experience. And products on the market that are successful do the same thing.
Another fine example would be those damn amazing Tempur-Pedic pillows and those FOM pillows filled with millions of foam beads. You’d be lying if you didn’t walk into Brookstone and didn’t squeeze teh pillows even though you know how they feel. EXACTLY. They invoked an emotion in you that it just feels cool. Heck, I want a Tempur-Pedic pillow just cause it melts in my hand and not in my mouth. Studies have shown that the pillow really doesn’t support that well and actually increases body temperature, due to the foam’s natural ability to insulate! So don’t believe the hype!
But really, there are hundreds of products out there that invoke this kind of behavior. it creates an impulse of “coolness”. If you think of other products go ahead and leave a comment, if not, screw you and go buy a pillow! 
