Alistair K@danilo I got a new dishwasher recently and my first criterion – that frustrated the sales staff – is that the controls had to be something other than deliberately useless.
There are many books on this. My favourite is Klaus Krippendorf, The semantic turn: a new foundation for design. It is far more accessible than the title might suggest.
On how design interacts with emotions, there's good stuff in Don Norman, The design of everyday things.
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