MDTL’s research on “Designing Technologies for Wellbeing” was featured on the Cornell Research.

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Designing Technologies for Wellbeing

Our daily use of smartphones and social media can engender pleasurable moments, but can these technologies contribute to genuine happiness?

With this CAREER award, Jay Yoon, Human Centered Design, is developing new approaches to technology design to support the creation of smartphone apps, home appliances, and other everyday technologies that improve wellbeing over the long term. This research draws on recent insights from positive psychology, which emphasizes people’s capacity to improve their mental health by enhancing and savoring experiences of joy, contentment, fascination, and other positive emotions. This project will specifically address technology use among adolescents and young adults, who are less likely than older adults to practice behaviors that enhance positive emotions. This population is also more inclined to seek immediate gratification and less likely to take advantage of traditional health interventions such as mental health counseling.

This project pursues a detailed understanding of the relationship between technology design, user-technology interactions, positive emotion, and wellbeing. Researchers will analyze the role of everyday technology in reinforcing and prolonging positive emotions. They will then develop new technology that facilitates increased positive experiences and evaluate their effects on wellbeing. Finally, through a series of co-creative workshops and seminars, researchers will draw on the perspectives of design professionals to translate the resulting insights into practical design tools and methods.

On August 15, 2022, MDTL gave a guest lecture at CuriousU, International Summer School in Europe, organized by Design Lab of University of Twente, the Netherlands.
The lecture was part of “Design the Future” and “Health & Happiness” tracks in which 30 students from design and psychology participated.

Abstract

With the emerging realization of the contribution of design-mediated positive emotions to well-being, evoking positive emotions became explicit design objectives. However, experiencing positive emotions does not necessarily lead to increased well-being effectively. Studies show that a few intense positive emotions can be ineffective in improving well-being. People quickly become accustomed to the pleasure, eventually finding it mundane. At worst, some positive emotions can engender deconstructive behaviors such as over-engagement on social media. Thus, a question emerges: how can products be designed to enhance and extend positivity in a well-being enhancing way? This CuriousU guest lecture addresses the design contribution to positive experiences, especially focusing on design-mediated Positive Emotion Regulation (PER). Students will learn theoretical and empirical aspects of PER and their relevance to design practice. Through a combination of lecture and hands-on exercise, the students will gain an overview of diverse ways of enabling users to up-regulate their positive emotions, and discuss how the overview can be used to identify design opportunities with users’ well-being in mind.

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.

On July 29, 2021, Bethany Welgoss, MA successfully defended her master thesis entitled “It’s ugly. That’s why it works beautifully: An exploratory study using design strategies to violate aesthetic principles as means to influence usage behaviors”. The thesis was supervised by Dr. Jay Yoon of Design+Environmental Analysis and Dr. Manoj Thomas of SC Johnson College of Business.

Abstract
This thesis explores how aesthetic violation can be used to influence a user’s behavior when interacting with a product. Aesthetic violation occurs when the elements of a design purposely deviate from the aesthetic expectations of the user in order to encourage a behavioral response. This draws from the theory of processing fluency, which suggests that aesthetic perceptions are a function of a perceiver’s processing dynamics—the more fluently a perceiver can process an object, the higher the aesthetic response. In this instance, the desire for fluent processing may incite users to escape, minimize, or counteract the violation. A literature review and two workshops were conducted: (1) to generate design strategies and (2) to assess and refine them. The workshops provided insights into the benefits and relevance of aesthetic violation, strategy formation, and integration into the design process.

Sometimes user disorientation can be a good thing.
Science museums know this well – designing exhibits to challenge and confound visitors is a great way to promote deeper engagement and learning. But the way these experiences are designed often excludes blind and visually impaired visitors.
We’re working to identify tools and strategies to help designers create these rich, challenging experiences – without an over-reliance on visual content.

If you have experience designing for emotion, play, learning, or accessibility, and are interested in collaborating with other designers, we invite you to participate in our research. We’ll be hosting two (remote) workshops in May and June to explore and test design strategies for accessible, rich learning experiences in the museum.

Interested in participating, or learning more about the project?
Contact Michael Brigham at mab654@cornell.edu

Illustration by Valery Lemay

On February 17, Dr. Haian Xue will give a guest lecture on “Introspection & designer’s experiential connoisseurship” for the course DEA 3308 Positive Design Studio run by Dr. Jay Yoon.

Dr. Haian Xue is Assistant Professor of Department of Human-Centered Design at Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. His research focuses on the mechanisms that underlie mood experiences in human-design interaction. This lecture:

1. uncovers the epistemological and methodological limitations of the mainstream ‘trouble-free’ (seemingly objective) experience design research methods,
2. introduces the first-person/introspective methods for experience design,
3. points out the inseparability of the researcher/designer (the introspector) and introspection, and finally
4. elaborates the concept of experiential connoisseurship as an acquirable faculty that plays a crucial role in the successful practice of introspective methods.

By guiding the students to go through a structured process of introspection on a lived emotional experience, the following Experience Design Introspection (XDI) workshop introduces a pathway to cultivate and continuous advance their experiential connoisseurship.

The lecture will be online and open to all Cornell students who are interested in the topic.

• Time: Feb 17, 2021 at 08:00 am
• Zoom link: https://bit.ly/2NVWhGl (Passcode: 588552 / Participants will be admitted to the meeting individually).

Related reading material

• Xue, H., & Desmet, P. M. A. (2019). Researcher introspection for experience- driven design research. Design Studies, 63, 37–64. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2019.03.001. Download (via Cornell Library)

On November 18, 2020, Jeremy Faulk, MS successfully defended his master thesis entitled “Does the Diversity of Savoring Strategies Increase Happiness? An Experimental Study of Design-Mediated Well-Being.” The thesis was supervised by Dr. Jay Yoon of Design+Environmental Analysis and Dr. Michael Goldstein of Psychology.

Abstract
When we look forward to enjoyable events or share positive experiences with others, we can prolong and amplify positive emotions. These and other savoring strategies can increase our well-being. Yet, it remains unclear whether practicing a diversity of savoring strategies adds its own happiness-boosting effect. In this 1 x 3 randomized controlled study, N = 71 participants either received an 8-day, original interactive scratch-off poster to facilitate high- or low savoring diversity, or they journaled in the control condition. Multiple linear regression models give varied results for well- being outcomes while qualitative data provide insights into the intervention’s effectiveness at promoting positive experiences.