Emotional Design and the Healthcare Environment

Marco Maiocchi graduated in 1969 with a degree in Physics. He served as assistant professor in Computer Science at the University of Milan beginning in 1973, and then as a full professor at the Politecnico di Milano, Faculty of Design. Retiring in 2013, he has continued teaching, up to and including the present day, at Politecnico di Milano, Design Faculty, and is a lecturer at the Conservatorio di Milano. After twenty years of research in Programming Methodologies, Software Quality and Engineering, he moved the focus of his research toward the Internet, Multimedia Communication, Neurosciences in Communication and Emotional Design. Among the founders of Etnoteam in 1978, he was also CEO of I.NET until 2004. He has been responsible for many software projects, including Government Researches. He has been an active presence in many cultural and artistically avant-garde circles, as well as being the author of many books and hundreds of scientific and popularized papers.

Dr. Zhabiz Shafieyoun is currently an adjunct professor at Winthrop University. She was a research scholar at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign from 2015-2019. She earned a Ph.D. in Design with a concentration in Design Research from the Politecnico di Milano, Italy, in 2016. Both her Bachelor's and Master's degrees are in Industrial Design from the Art University of Tabriz. Additionally, she has 10 years of industry experience working for five major Iranian companies as a designer, researcher and creative director, work she has executed in three different countries. Her doctoral work explored a variety of topics, including emotional design, service design, and healthcare design. Using the Japanese method of Kansei Engineering, she studied emotional design in healthcare centers, focusing on ideas for increasing positive emotions and designing a new method for determining the emotional impact of waiting areas. She co-founded the European Kansei Engineering Group in 2014.