— 651 656 Celebration & Contemplation, 10th International Conference on Design & Emotion 27 — 30 September 2016, Amsterdam Introduction Among designers and engineers, ambiguity has always been a topic to avoid for the sake of facilitating smooth human-product interactions and ease in product use. Unlike the practices in different fields of art, which make use of ambiguity frequently to evoke intriguing and engaging art experiences, the potentials of ambiguity in product design and what it can offer users as a ‘special’ product experience have been rarely explored. To our knowledge, Gaver, Beaver, and Benford (2003) are among the first to embrace ambiguity as a rich resource for designing human- computer interactions and to offer design strategies to enhance, create or provoke ambiguity when designing information, context, and relationships. Alex Zakkas (2013) explored how ambiguity could induce creativity when people interacted with, and made use of, an object that is abundant in our lives, i.e., a twig. Product designers such as Philippe Starck also explored ambiguity in their work. Starck’s Juicy Salif, with its unconventional features for a lemon juicer, has dual-functionality envisioned by the designer: one being a lemon squeezer, the other being a conversation starter in awkward moments (Lloyd & Snelders, 2003). Although foundations of ambiguity have not been theoretically studied in the field of experience design, designers seem to have been exploring the potentials of ambiguity in practical ways in order to provide users with novel and exciting experiences. With this paper we aim to demonstrate several uses of ambiguity in product design, systematically categorize the examples of ambiguous products, and support our visual findings with theoretical insights. Examples of product ambiguity and theoretical foundations By definition, anything that is ambiguous is open to more than one interpretation and does not have a fixed meaning. The process of discovery of meaning is therefore an exciting and rewarding moment for the user who is interacting with an ambiguous object. Such discovery also implies a personal significance, a secret and intimate relationship between the object and the person. Furthermore, resolving ambiguity not only activates processes of meaning attribution but also affective processes pertaining to aesthetic appreciation and emotions. On a functional level of product experience, ambiguity can leave the door open to interpretation in order to spark users’ creativity and ingenuity in discovering and exploring novel / genuine uses and contexts for the product. Our visual perception constantly detects and identifies objects through categorization. The process of object identification consists of three consequential sub- processes. These are perception, cognition and appraisal leading for emotional response. Perceptual processes try to make sense of the object form, thus it is an internal search to find a match within visual memory (does this object exist?). Perceptual processes may also give rise to sensory pleasure as in aesthetic appreciation. Upon perception, cognitive processes try to make sense of the object identity; thus it is a categorical search within the repertoire of well- established concepts (what exactly is this object?). Upon cognition, emotional processes take over in order to assign the beneficial value (good / bad) of the object; thus, it is a search for a right response (how should I act? Approach or avoid?). Ambiguity is fundamentally a glitch in the process of object identification. Theoretically, we see three possibilities for ambiguity to take place: i. the inherent properties of the object does not give rise to any recognition in the perceiver (i.e., perceptual ambiguity); ii. upon object perception, cognitive processes give rise to many different conceptual associations (i.e., cognitive ambiguity); and iii. upon cognition, appraisal component of emotional Abstract This paper visually