Tag: well-being driven design

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Purpal: An interactive box that enables positive mental traveling

Purpal: An interactive box that enables positive mental traveling

Publication:

  • Yoon, J., Li, S., & Yu, H. (2021). Design-mediated positive emotion regulation: The development of an interactive device that supports daily practice of positive mental time traveling, International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction. 1-15. Download
  • Li, S., Yu, H., & Yoon, J. (2020). PurPal: An Interactive Box that Up-regulates Positive Experiences in Consumption Behaviors.  CHI’20 Late-Breaking Work on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI LBW 2020). ACM. Honolulu, HI, USA. Download

With emerging new technologies, the ways we buy things have become quicker and more transient: one-click or scanning, then all set. While efficient and useful, unfortunately, research has shown that it inadvertently influences people to mainly focus on material acquisition rather than being appreciative of experiential values—the joy of thinking about what they want to do with the purchased items or why the items are important to them. The pleasure sparked by material gain wears off quickly, failing to make people happier in the long run. 

Pupal, a self-administered behavioral intervention technology, can be used when a user plans to spend money on something such as a hobby, gift, education, travel, or just a new cloth. When a user pushes the button, the device shows an adaptive question about the item the user intends to buy. Examples are: What do you want to say when you offer it?, How does this event contribute to your relationship?, What’s the first thing you want to do when you get there?,  Where do you want to put it?, What’s the first thing you want to do with it?, and  Who do you want to show it first?

The purchase intention can be communicated to Purpal by choosing an experience category represented by an RFID embedded card. The questions are printed on a small piece of paper that the user can put in her wallet or stick on a board, which allows the pleasure of answering the question resonate. In this way, Purpal enables, supports, and inspires people to engage in savoring their positive experiences that can be mediated by the items to buy, eventually enriching their purchasing experiences.

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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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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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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.