“Getting in the mood”

The cousin of emotion
Article on how Mood of a space affects people


What are emotions and what are moods? Think of emotion as an event that occurs during user interaction. It is when a natural instinctive state of mind derives from one's circumstances. Mood is more of a background variable that sustains across time. It's this ability to sustain emotional events. Most of the Design community focus is on usability and bypasses mood. The main reason is because mood is thought to be too difficult to measure. However, mood is as powerful as sentiment or emotion and requires more serious study. 
Emotion is one of the strongest differentiators in user experience namely because it triggers unconscious responses to a product, environment or interface. Our feelings strongly influence our perceptions and often frame how we think about or refer to our experiences and memories. Emotions and thinking seem so different, that we classify them as different kinds of phenomena. Clear thinking requires eliminating emotions. It means that you have probably trained yourself to focus on the critical, functional flaws of a design while forgetting about the role of emotion. However, when we think about mood design and usability, we typically think of it as "keeping the user happy". This includes designing to minimize the common emotions related to poor usability such as frustration, annoyance, anger, fear, and confusion. Mood impacts long term user adoption, the more we keep users in a good mood, the more they will be able to sustain desirability, pleasurability and emotional aspects of design key to creating the "Wow" experience.
The only issue about mood design is it’s being so subjective. One might find a room full of flowers pleasant while others might not. Even so, we can make assumption from the majority, which means don’t think of attracting this Emirati guy, but think of attracting Emiratis in general. Specific atmosphere attracts certain type of people, and that is the way I tackle the design process with the idea of “Designing from Mood backwards.”
Thinking in a different direction, in order to design a mood we need to know what mood already existed, what atmosphere they created, corresponding to the desire of people. In short, know the mood, know the atmosphere, know the people, and lastly know the elements. Dubai is a land of wonder where everything can happen. It is interesting how they build so many new attractions that could draw tourists from all over the world. Interestingly, Dubai population has grown rapidly and the city is composed mostly of foreigner and expatriates. The mall will not be design for the need of people but will aim for a way to keep users in a good mood with desirability to spend.