The experimental work was made with students of industrial product design in collaboration with “Small and Medium-sized Enterprises” (SMEs). SMEs constitute 94.6% of Turkish industry, but they are not adequately familiar with product design. Therefore, collaboration with SMEs initially requires an explanation of what product design is. If SMEs are not given a thorough explanation and orientation, they take for granted that innovation is limited to products which look like those in the market or to products that are only a few steps ahead of those in the market.  Accordingly, we started the experimental project with a different concept so that we made SMEs accept the project definition and give the designs a direction towards innovation from the onset. The project was titled “Emotional Interactional Approaches to Lighting Instruments”.

Relevance to Design Practice and Theory: It provides a direct approach to design application. To create difference in design, a method which is already different is implemented. The sophisticated difference in the beginning could be lessened to equate the design to those exist in the market according to expectations by the SME. The project is evaluated throughout along with the concepts such as aesthetic function, aesthetical emotions, etc. which are doubtlessly indispensable for design. We tried to theorize the information obtained from the experimental work.

Key words: Lighting instruments design, emotional interaction, aesthetic.