Tag: qualitative research

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Connecting sustainable and well-being-enhancing behaviors: Reflections through daily practices of young adults

Publication

  • Kowalski, M. & Yoon, J. (2024). Connecting sustainable and well-being-enhancing behaviors: Reflections through daily practices of young adults. DRS: Design Research Society, Boston, MA. Download
  • Kowalski, M. & Yoon, J. (2024). Connecting Sustainable Behavior and Subjective Well-being: An Experiential Model for Design, Journal of Design Research (Under review)

An experience sampling study was conducted to further understand daily activities of young adults with implications for Environmentally Sustainable Behavior (SB) and Subjective Well-being (SWB) simultaneously. Studies on SB and SWB are pre- sent in established bodies of design research, though connection across these strands appears limited. Analysis of 209 survey responses from 27 participants showed that while many activities were reported with mutually positive outcomes for SB and SWB, when there was conflict, individuals were more likely to prioritize their own subjective well-being over environmental sustainability. Activities that included designed prod- ucts and environments that more readily supported SB and SWB without imposing an external conflict, and those that included social bonding and sharing of resources led to more mutually positive outcomes. The findings present avenues for design research- ers and practitioners in developing designs that can address individuals’ well-being and environmentally sustainable behavior in a more positive and complimentary manner.

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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.