Designing Moments of Meaning and Pleasure. Experience Design and Happiness
Marc Hassenzahl, Kai Eckoldt, Sarah Diefenbach, Matthias Laschke, Eva Anna Lenz, Joonhwan Kim · International journal of design · 2013
IntroductionThe pursuit of individual is central to life. Surprisingly, psychology did not study it extensively until only a decade ago. In 2000, Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi noted: [P]sychologists have scant knowledge of what makes life worth living (p. 5) and accordingly started Positive Psychology. Since then the empirical study of has gained significant momentum (e.g., Kahneman, 1999, 2011; Lopez & Snyder, 2009; Lyubomirsky, 2007; Seligman, 2011).Borrowing from Lyubomirsky (2007), we understand as the of joy, contentment, or positive well-being, combined with a sense that one's life is good, meaningful and worthwhile (p. 32). It, thus, has immediate, specific, affective component that is experiencing many pleasant and only few unpleasant moments in different situations, and a more long-term, global, cognitive component of general life satisfaction (see subjective well-being, Diener, 2000). In other words, the pursuit of requires the acquisition of positive experiences on a day-to-day basis and a more general assessment of life as positive and meaningful. Obviously, can be understood as outside the control of individuals, a result of mere destiny, lucky circumstances, or genetic predisposition. However, studies show (see Lyubomirsky, 2007, for overview) that a good part of depends on activities and is, thus, variable. Through the deliberate and active engagement with the world, people can--at least to some degree--take control over their experiences and, thus, make themselves more (or less) happy.This raises exciting but challenging opportunity for Industrial Design, Product Design, and Interaction Design: Should it not be possible to for happiness by enriching people's everyday lives with positive experiences through artifact-mediated activities? This challenge is two-fold: First, it requires a profound understanding of what a positive experience is and how it is created through activity. Second, it requires strategies to create and mediate experiences through stuff. The present paper explores this notion of experience-centered design of artifacts with in mind. We start with a clarification of what experience is, closing with a reflection about the relationship between experiences and the material. We then outline potential steps of Experience Design with the help of illustrative case study. Finally, we reflect upon the morality implied by designing experiences.Understanding Experiences: From Happiness to Affect, Needs, Practices, and ThingsExperience is a concept with a rich history and meaning (Jay, 2005). Many interpretations and foci exist. Note that we are fully aware of this and do not intend to colonialize the term. Experience and Experience Design just come closest to what we actually attempt to convey.We understand experience as an episode, a chunk of time that one went through--with sights and sounds, feelings and thoughts, motives and actions [...] closely knitted together, stored in memory, labeled, relived, and communicated to others. An experience is a story, emerging from the dialogue of a person with her or his world through action (Hassenzahl, 2010, p. 8). After going through episode, people engage in meaning-making. They literally tell stories to themselves (and others; Baumeister & Newman, 1994). These stories contain the When, Where, and What, detailing a temporal-spatial structure and the content of the experience. In addition, people can tell whether their experience had been positive or negative (i.e., affectivity). Affectivity is a crucial ingredient of experience (Desmet & Hekkert, 2007; Forlizzi & Battarbee, 2004; Hassenzahl, 2010; McCarthy & Wright, 2004)--any experience has emotional thread (McCarthy & Wright, 2004), and it is this affectivity which relates experiences to happiness.However, to stop there would fall short of inspiring design. …