Industrial design strategies for eliciting surprise

• Surprise is an emotion designers often wish to elicit through their products.
• Interviews asked thirty influential designers worldwide how they intend to surprise.
• State of the art methodology, situational analysis, was used for the analysis of interviews.
• Positional maps that suggest patterns and strategies designers use to surprise were developed.
• Eleven strategies offer explicit knowledge and partly uncover the mysticism around designers.

This paper reports on strategies industrial designers use when attempting to elicit surprise. Thirty senior representatives from influential design organisations were interviewed. A situational analysis of the responses suggests strategies that designers use as motivation for starting a design project. These include observations of social issues in the designers’ world and observations of their personal experience at behavioural, cognitive and emotional levels. We also found strategies that designers apply during the design process: using archetypes in unexpected contexts/objects, challenging assumptions of appearance, magical interactions, the smart doubling of things and unexpected scale. We suggest that a research through design approach may uncover further strategies that designers use implicitly and did not explicitly mention during the interviews.