Jay Yoon, Director of Cornell’s Meta Design & Technology Lab received NSF CAREER award with the research “Using Positive Emotion Regulation to Design Everyday Technologies that Promote Well-being.”
NSF’s CAREER: The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program offers the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.

The grant will support the research from 2022 to 2027. The project abstract is as follows.

The project advances human-centered design research by integrating positive emotion regulation (PER) theory into the design of future technologies. Our daily use of smartphones, appliances, and social media can engender pleasurable moments, but they do not inherently lead to improved well-being. People adapt to the joys of using technologies, then find them mundane. Some positive emotions can cause deconstructive behaviors, such as over-engagement on social media. The project investigates designing technologies to support positive emotion regulation in young adults, a population whose mental health can be impacted by limited emotion regulation skills and challenges to accessing traditional health interventions. Practical design methods and tools for the development of such technologies are being generated by incorporating perspectives of design professionals through a series of co-creative workshops and seminars. A toolkit and methods reflecting insights into emotion regulation is being developed and disseminated to help designers create innovative and evidence-based emotion-managing technologies. The project promotes STEM education for underserved students through novel community-engagement programs that encourage students to think critically about how everyday technologies shape human emotion and behavior.