A Study of Emotional Sustainability Between Industrial Products and Users

This study takes sustainable design and emotional design as its theoretical foundations, focusing on the core issue in the current product design field—the disconnection between "functionality-oriented design" and "users' emotional needs". By systematically exploring the forms of emotional connection between users and products in daily interactions (such as the sense of pleasure in usage scenarios and the sense of identity after long-term use), this study conducts an in-depth analysis of the essential connotation and development laws of emotional sustainability between products and users. The study attempts to take emotion as the core link to resolve, at the psychological level, the problems of users' excessive dependence on products and frequent product replacement caused by "rapid functional iteration" and "weak emotional connection". Throughout the entire product usage cycle, it also aims to cultivate users' empathy towards products (e.g., understanding the humanistic care behind product design) and nostalgic emotions (e.g., preserving exclusive memories during usage) through design guidance, thereby extending the product life cycle. By sorting out existing research results and practical cases, this study focuses on identifying key emotional triggers that can enhance long-term interaction between users and products (for instance, product usability reduces the threshold for use, aesthetic experience enhances emotional identification, and memory association strengthens exclusive emotional connections), and analyzes how these factors influence users' emotional retention towards products and usage intention through multi-dimensional effects. On this basis, this study intends to construct a theoretical framework for emotional sustainability design. This framework can not only reduce resource consumption and environmental impact caused by excessive product replacement by extending the product life cycle, but also improve users' product satisfaction and long-term psychological sense of belonging by meeting their in-depth emotional needs, thereby enhancing users' mental health. Furthermore, the findings of this study are expected to provide multi-dimensional practical guidance for the product design industry: on the one hand, it helps designers integrate the concept of emotional sustainability into the conceptual design stage, balancing functional practicality and emotional value; on the other hand, it provides implementable emotional design strategies for product categories closely related to users' daily lives, such as home appliances, digital products, and furniture. Ultimately, this will contribute to the development of sustainable products that not only conform to the current needs of green ecological development, but also deeply align with human emotional demands.