Tag: prototyping

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Bloom: Scaffolding multiple positive emotion regulation techniques to enhance casual conversations and promote the subjective well-being of emerging adults

Publication

  • Kozin, K., Mapara, S., Bao, J., Chao, H, & Yoon, J. (2024) Bloom: Scaffolding multiple positive emotion regulation techniques to enhance casual conversations and promote the subjective well-being of emerging adults (manuscript in preparation).

Bloom is an interactive artifact created to address the lack of meaningful in-person social interactions among emerging adults. Drawing upon emotion regulation theories, the development of Bloom explores whether incorporating multiple Positive Emotion Regulation (PER) techniques into a single artifact can effectively enhance users’ subjective well-being in their routines. The paper discusses the design methodology employed to develop a prototype that supports five PER techniques, along with the design components, and preliminary user testing of the prototype. The chosen PER techniques are: (1) Being immersed and absorbed, (2) Engaging in a collective, (3) Creating a savoring atmosphere, (4) Sharing the positive experience with others, and (5) Infusing ordinary events with positive meaning. The paper discusses the benefits of enabling users to utilize diverse PER techniques to enhance their well-being, and future research directions for assessing the efficacy of Bloom and refining its design.

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LEV: A behavioral intervention technology that supports young adults’ emotion management

Publication

  • Yoon, J., Vira, A., Jung, D. & Kim, C. (2023) LEV: A behavioral intervention technology that supports young adults’ emotion management. (manuscript in preparation).

LEV is a behavioral intervention technology designed to support young adults’ well-being by helping them better manage their emotions (both positive and negative). LEV builds on an emotion-regulating strategy called reappraisal, which refers to changing how one thinks either about the situation itself or about one’s capacity to manage it. For example, people can uplift their positive emotions by increasing the perceived value of the situation (e.g., believing one’s items are irreplaceable), cherishing the little resource left (e.g., listing time left in college), and adopting a grateful outlook (e.g., counting blessings every day). LEV is a small robotic creature that inhabits a user’s home and is a part of their daily routine. LEV guides users through a storytelling activity in which they reflect on and explore events in their daily lives. During the interaction, users recall a recent emotional event and then engage in reappraisal to retell the event from a particular emotional perspective. LEV supports this activity by initiating user interactions, choosing an emotional perspective based on current and historical user input, and providing feedback in gesture-based communication. By providing day-to-day opportunities to consider events from different angles, LEV aims to help users reflect on their daily lives constructively and critically. With time and repetition of the interaction, users can improve their reappraisal ability and become more emotionally adaptive in a variety of positive and negative situations.

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Does practicing a diversity of savoring techniques help enhance happiness?

Click the image to enlarge.
Interaction scenarios for Revealing Moments in which two individuals self-select different positive activities in response to the same ambiguous prompt (i.e., “Bring light”).

Publication

  • Faulk, J., & Yoon, J. (2023). Does practicing a diversity of savoring techniques help enhance happiness? A randomized-controlled trial of design-mediated well-being, Journal of Design Research. (In press – Downloadable upon request)
  • Faulk, J.D., Oluwadairo, O., & Yoon, J. (2022). Secret dance and bring light: Enhancing user autonomy through directional ambiguity in designing positive emotion regulation interventions. Design Research Society (DRS), Bilbao, ES. Download

When we look forward to enjoyable events or share positive experiences with others we can prolong and amplify our positive emotions. These and other savoring techniques can increase our subjective well-being. Yet, it remains unknown whether practicing a variety of savoring techniques adds its own happiness-enhancing effect. In this 1X3 randomized-controlled trial, 71 participants used a novel, interactive poster to facilitate high vs. low savoring diversity over eight days, or they journaled in the control condition. Unlike other positive psychology interventions, the poster was designed to inspire users to self-select their own happiness-enhancing activities. Regression analyses showed that while cognitive well-being increased in the high diversity condition, emotional well-being did not. These results suggested that assigning savoring diversity may have modestly contributed to users’ cognitive well-being. Written responses further pointed to the poster’s potential effectiveness in promoting positive experiences. Implications for design practice and directions for future research are discussed.

A diagram that depicts how practicing diverse savoring techniques may increase participants’ well-being.

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Variapsody: Creating three interactive music listening experiences that use diversified positive emotion regulation strategies to promote subjective well-being

Publication

  • Ghanem, M. & Yoon, J. (2022). Variapsody: Creating three interactive music listening experiences that use diversified positive emotion regulation strategies to promote subjective well-being.  CHI’22 Late-Breaking Work on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI LBW 2022). ACM. New Orleans, LA, USA. Download

Over the past decade, initiatives to design for subjective well-being have gained increased attention and momentum in design research. These initiatives often draw from positive psychology to explore ways of making Positive Psychology Interventions (PPIs) more effective through technology. This paper explores how a mix of tangible and digital technology can realize activity-focused, diverse emotion regulation for its users. We propose that emotion regulation strategies can serve as a principle for designing technology that encourages users to savor, modify, reassess, or commemorate their experiences. By centering the design around music listening experiences, the paper demonstrates how users can be supported to overcome motivation hurdles that get in the way of frequent engagement with a PPI. Variapsody is a device that enriches music listening with three features, each deploying a different set of emotion regulation strategies that make the experience more enjoyable and meaningful. Variapsody’s regulatory diversity offers users the choice of how to approach music listening and expands their repertoire of ER strategies. The first feature, Reaction Tile, inscribes users’ reactions to music onto a tangible, domino-sized tile to encourage them to savor the music. The second is Monofilter, which purposefully muffles the salience of background music while working on a cognitively demanding task. Vibelist is the third feature that helps users capture and revisit the context of music listening experiences in a digital collage. The paper discusses the lessons learned and future research opportunities.

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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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Design for interest: Exploratory study on a distinct positive emotion in human-product interaction

Research conducted at ID-StudioLab
Publication:

  • Yoon, J., Desmet, P. M. A., & van der Helm, A. (2012). Design for interest: Exploratory study on a distinct positive emotion in human-product interaction. International Journal of Design, 6(2), 67-80.
  • Yoon, J. (2010). Interest in human-product interactions. Delft: Delft University of Technology

Can we design interactions that evoke a distinct positive emotion? This project explored the possibilities to design interactions that elicit user interest. On the basis of appraisal theory, it was predicted that interest is evoked by a combined appraisal of novelty-complexity (a product must be appraised as novel and/or complex) and coping potential (one appraises oneself to have sufficient skills and resources to deal with an event). Three music players were developed to test this hypothesis. These were identical in terms of appearance, but different in terms of interaction qualities. The music player consists of a wooden container, a bar, a speaker, LEDs, and two electromagnets. The electronic components are housed inside the wooden container. The bar is for switching on/off, changing songs and controlling volume range. The setting of electromagnets and LEDs was programmed for manipulation of interaction qualities and behaviors of the music players. This project was featured in Dutch Ergonomics Society News.

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Q-sight, A product-service system for collecting customer feedback  

Research conducted in collaboration with NetQ (Utrecht, the Netherlands)

NetQ is a Dutch company that provides Internet-based tools for gathering customer feedback. In this project, NetQ asked to propose a new business direction and design interventions that enable the company to expand their product portfolio. Interviews with the clients who used NetQ’s existing solutions were carried out to explore design opportunities with respect to gathering and synthesizing consumer feedback. The factors that influence respondents’ motivation to participate in research or survey were investigated through focus groups. The interaction vision of the solution was that the customers voluntarily express their opinions with concrete underlying reasons, finding this process beneficial for themselves. We developed Q-Sight, an indoor customer feedback system that tracks the flow of customers’ movements, and measures their emotional states towards their surroundings (e.g., art pieces in the museum, the layout of a supermarket, etc.). Q-sight was devised to let the customers have the opportunity to create a memory of their experience: they can give feedback and keep it in the form of a photo album or share it through social media. The envisioned benefits for the client were: they can see how customers experience the space by seeing the tracking data, and gain insights into how they could improve the space or the services based on the reported customers’ emotions.

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Information system for the waiting room of the emergency department

Research conducted at Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology
Publication:

  • Yoon, J., & Sonneveld, M. (2010). Anxiety of patients in the waiting room of the emergency department (pp. 279–286). Presented at the 4th international conference on tangible, embedded, and embodied interaction (TEI), Cambridge, MA, USA: ACM.

Several studies have shown that although people in the waiting room of emergency department often feel numb, being afraid, or having no control, and hospital staffs often fail to notice these patients’ problems and to offer appropriate and timely patient care. This project aimed to understand the patients’ experiences in the waiting room and to develop a design intervention that enhances the waiting experience. I explored the context and interactions in the waiting room with a focus on the factors that cause anxiety of patients by observing them and their family members, and interviewing the head of the department. The main findings were distrust between patients and staffs of the hospital, the patients’ consistent focus on their status, and an uncertainty about the waiting time. To moderate these anxieties, an interactive information service that enables patients to gain sufficient information about the procedure and the waiting time was proposed. The solution creates an informative environment through an ambient visualization that embodies the patient profile and the order of waiting people in real-time on the basis of the result of patients’ triage tests and the operation policy of the department.