Human Factors: In the Mood for Design
A video-based exploration of physical, cognitive, and emotional human factors in everyday interaction.
Coursework and personal work from Carnegie Mellon, originally published on a separate Framer site.
A vending machine, late at night
This project was created as an individual midterm project for MA Principles & Practices at Carnegie Mellon University in Fall 2025. The assignment required a short video and a companion poster exploring physical, cognitive, and emotional human factors through a real-world example.
I produced a one-minute narrative video and a conceptual poster, using the everyday interaction with a vending machine as the central case study. The work was filmed on campus, late at night.
Mood over explanation
The project was conducted to develop a holistic understanding of people in design, beyond usability or aesthetics alone. Rather than treating physical, cognitive, and emotional factors as isolated checklists, the goal was to explore how these factors coexist and accumulate in a single moment of interaction — how design becomes meaningful not through novelty, but through its alignment (or misalignment) with human bodies, mental models, and emotional states.
I developed the poster first to articulate the detailed human-factors analysis, then translated that content into a short video through storytelling rather than explanation. Treating the video as a film teaser, I focused on mood and atmosphere, drawing visual inspiration from Chungking Express (Wong Kar-wai, 1994) to keep a consistent tone across both mediums.
Design as a condition, not a checklist
Through this project I came to understand design not only as a set of features, but as a condition shaped by human readiness — physical fatigue, cognitive expectation, emotional tension. Small decisions, like button placement, feedback timing, or retrieval height, can significantly influence trust, frustration, and satisfaction.
I also learned how narrative and cinematic framing can work as analytical tools, surfacing human factors that a purely functional evaluation might overlook.
Whose body the design assumes
If I were to revisit this project, I would expand the analysis to a wider range of bodies and contexts — users of different heights, wheelchair users, people carrying items. Many physical design decisions turned out to rest on standardized anthropometric data centered on an average adult body; a future iteration could more explicitly examine who is excluded by those standards, and how emotional responses differ when physical access becomes strained.
I would not change the narrative approach, though. The combination of video, script, and reflective poster proved effective at capturing the intimacy of human–design interaction, which aligned strongly with the project’s intent.