Tag: design tool

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Design for Happiness Deck

Research conducted in collaboration with Delft Institute of Positive Design
Publication:

  • Desmet, P. M. A., Pohlmeyer, A. E., & Yoon, J.(2018). Design for Happiness Deck.Delft, Delft University of Technology. ISBN: 978-94-92516-86-2. Download

Repost from Delft Institute of Positive Design

To design for happiness sounds like a grand undertaking. Some might even say an overly ambitious one – but we disagree. We believe that explicitly focusing on customer happiness is an indispensable part of user-centred design and, ultimately, a reliable predictor of a design’s success.

The Design for Happiness Deck is a tool that you can use to tap into the vast potential of lasting wellbeing. Use it to break down the seemingly overwhelming phenomenon of happiness into manageable components that offer you a direct doorway to ideation and analyses of your design project.

Based on the Positive Design framework developed by Pieter Desmet and Anna Pohlmeyer, these three card sets explore three essential aspects of designing for happiness:

  • Pleasure – happiness that comes from enjoying the moment
  • Personal Significance – happiness derived from having a sense of progressing towards a future goal and from the awareness of past achievements
  • Virtue – happiness that is the result of morally valued behaviour

For each aspect, a fine-grained overview of 24 potential manifestations is provided – 24 shades of pleasure, 24 human goals and 24 virtuous character strengths, combining to a total set of 72 cards.

By considering these concrete units of human experience, you will immediately be able to challenge the wellbeing prospects of your future designs. We leave it to you to decide how and when to use the card sets – to inform your research, trigger new ideas, get specific about targeting wellbeing, justify your design decisions, or simply inspire your team.

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EmotionPrism: The development of a design tool that communicates 25 pleasurable human-product interactions

Research conducted at Delft Institute of Positive Design
Publication:

  • Yoon, J., Pohlmeyer, A. E., & Desmet, P. M. A. (2018). EmotionPrism: The development of a design tool that communicates 25 pleasurable human-product interactions, Journal of Design Research, 15(3/4), 174-196. Download

Some products are routinely described as “nice”, but what lies beneath that word? The range of positive emotions experienced in human-product interactions is multifarious. Differentiating positive emotions (e.g., joy, love, hope, and interest) and having an awareness of associated expressive interaction qualities (e.g., playful, careful, persistent and focused interaction) can support designers to influence users’ interactions in a favorable way. The emotionPrism is a design tool for designers to gain a better understanding specific positive emotions and related expressive interaction qualities. EmotionPrism is a collection of movie-sets that represents 25 different positive emotions in dynamic hand-object interactions, combined with theoretical descriptions of the emotions. Designers can use the tool to envision and discuss what kinds of interactions would be appropriate or desirable to incite and to select a set of relevant positive emotions accordingly by referring to the set of information as a repertoire to choose from.

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Interactive emotion exploration toolkit

Research conducted at ID-StudioLab and Delft Institute of Positive Design (Delft, the Netherlands)
Publication

  • Yoon, J., Pohlmeyer, A., & Desmet, P. (2016). “Feeling good” unpacked: Developing design tools to facilitate a differentiated understanding of positive emotions (pp. 266–274). Presented at the 10th International Conference on Design and Emotion – Celebration and Contemplation, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Download

This interactive playground is a package of three emotion-specific experience setups, ‘Assurance’, ‘Enjoyment’, and ‘Interest’, each of which enables designers to explore three similar positive emotions in an interactive way (nine emotions in total). In an interactive installation, design students can actually feel particular positive emotions and explore the differences by interacting with the installations. We assumed that in line with Buchenau, M., & Suri, J. F.1, offering firsthand experiences of particular positive emotions in a physically staged setup could give a visceral sense of differences between those emotions. This want meant to let designers bodily experience several emotions, and reflect on what caused the emotions, and how they reacted. The installation served as a platform of discussion.

  1. Buchenau, M., & Suri, J. F. (2000). Experience prototyping (pp. 424–433). Presented at the the conference, New York, New York, USA: ACM. ↩
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Towards a holistic design for subjective well-being

Researcher: Roby Michelangelo Vota
Involvement: Research advisor (chair: Dr. Stella Boess)
Research conducted at ID-Studiolab (Delft, the Netherlands)
Publication:

  • Vota, R. M. (2015). Towards a holistic design for subjective well-being. Delft: Delft University of Technology.

In current approaches to Design for Sustainable Behavior (DfSB), the main focus is on “mitigating, controlling or blocking unsustainable or inappropriate behavior by users”. The concept of sustainability appears limited to restraining the environmental impact of behaviors, often at the detriment of people’s subjective well-being. However, personal and environmental well-being are not only compatible but even mutually supportive aspects of sustainability. Hence, a research was conducted to explore how design can address environmental sustainability and subjective well-being as complementary aspects of sustainability. Through observations of sustainability-related design activities, a series of key factors influencing the design approach emerged. Focusing on the factor ’empathy towards people’s positive experiences’, a design method and a set of design tools and techniques was developed to validate the effects of an experience-driven approach on the positivity of Design for Sustainability. The proposed method was built around three key points: (1) positive experiences as the focus of preliminary design explorations, (2) empathic understanding of the components and mechanisms underlying the experiences, and (3) exploration of short- and long-term effects of experiences on both personal and environmental well-being.

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Positive emotional granularity cards

Research conducted at Delft Institute of Positive Design
Publication:

  • Yoon, J., Desmet, P. M. A., & Pohlmeyer, A. E. (2016). Developing usage guidelines for a card-based design tool: A case of the positive emotional granularity cards. Archives of Design Research, 29(4), 5–14. Download
  • Yoon, J., Pohlmeyer, A. E., & Desmet, P. M. A. (2015). Positive emotional granularity cards. Delft, Delft University of Technology. ISBN: 978-94-6186-440-6. Download
  • Yoon, J., Desmet, P. M. A., & Pohlmeyer, A. E. (2013). Embodied typology of positive emotions: The development of a tool to facilitate emotional granularity in design (pp. 1195–1206). Presented at the 5th International Congress of International Association of Sciences of Design Research (IASDR), Tokyo, Japan. Download

Positive emotional granularity cards are meant to support an emotion-focused design process by helping designers to get a nuanced understanding of positive emotions. The card-set consists of 25 cards, each of which represents a distinct positive emotion. The card-set incorporates definitions of emotion labels, eliciting conditions, and visuals of expressive behavioral manifestations. The visuals of expressive manifestations were developed and validated to clearly characterize the specific emotions. The card-set can be used in both design research and design practice as a tool for communication and as a source of inspiration. For instance, designers are enabled to communicate their design intentions in terms of emotional impact, and end-users are enabled to report the distinctiveness of emotional experiences. Furthermore, divergent thinking in design conceptualization can be facilitated by exploring the relationship between varied eliciting conditions of positive emotions and product features.

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PoEm – A toolkit for well-being-focused user research 

Researcher: Dwitya Prasasta Umaritomo
Involvement: Research advisor (chair: Prof. Dr. Jan Buijs)
Research conducted in collaboration with Philips Consumer Lifestyle (Drachten, the Netherlands)
Publication:

  • Umaritomo, D. P. (2013). Emotion-Driven Research in New Product Development. Delft: Delft University of Technology.

How can products and technology be designed to be purposeful to people that use them? The objective of this project was to invcestigate how user research had been conducted within Philips Consumer Lifestyle and to embed user-centered approach in it. Interviews and workshops that involved designers and user researchers in Philips were conducted. The results showed that it was necessary to broaden the scope of user research from usability to users’ emotional experiences and well-being in the early stage of product development. Based on this insight, a design toolkit ‘PoEm’ was proposed. PoEm was developed building on theories in positive psychology with an intention to assist designers and researchers to examine users’ values, needs, beliefs, and aspirations in three perspectives: pragmatic, hedonic, and eudaimonic. Pragmatic aspects refer to the degree to which a product fulfills a user’s goal, hedonic attributes mean how well a product fulfills an intangible need and/or provides an activity that evokes pleasurable emotions, and eudaemonic attributes are about how much a product contributes to realizing a purposeful goal and offers engaging activities that are considered virtuous. PoEm includes a set of adaptive questionnaires, a guideline for the interview, and a manual for analyzing the collected data.