Design is emotion. It talks to our senses, and sometime in its most extreme form it does not make sense any more. When Stendhal went to Italy, he suffered a case of temporary madness or, in his own words:

“I was in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in Florence, close to the great men whose tombs I had seen. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty … I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations … Everything spoke so vividly to my soul. Ah, if I could only forget. I had palpitations of the heart, what in Berlin they call ‘nerves.’ Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling.”

This reaction to the overwhelming amount of art, architecture and history is called Stendhal’s syndrome, tourist disease or Jerusalem syndrome.

Gaziella Magherini wrote a book about the Stendhal syndrome, in it she observed that
during the mirroring between the art and the subject a sublime, aesthetic, and uncanny event occurs. The art experience hooks a repressed trauma beneath the conscious sea of the subject rapidly pulling the trauma to the surface. The subject acts much like a distressed fish out of water.

Kevin Roberts of Saatchi and Saatchi wrote a book called Lovemarks which looks at people’s emotional relation with products, or “loyalty beyond reason” as Roberts calls it. We buy products not only out of necessity, but as a way to express ourselves. The clothes we wear, the car we drive, the vodka we drink, are all becoming part of our extended selves. Isn’t it normal that we start to feel emotional when we go shopping, overwhelmed with the variety of products and choices?
Early modern architects and designers tried to remove the emotional aspect from the design of cities, architecture and products. Le Corbusier spoke of the house as a machine for living, and wanted to start from zero, tabula rasa, a purist and fuctionalist design. However, I believe that we leave this all behind us and will see the emotional, humanistic aspect of design becoming dominant. (again)