Design for happiness-enhancing activities: Development of design strategies for the activities of learning to forgive and avoiding overthinking

This research-by-design project provides designers with new strategies to design for sustained well-being.Positive activities have been proposed as the most promising starting point to improve well-being (Wiese et al., 2020). Currently, 14 activities have been identified (Lyubomirsky, 2007; Wiese et al., 2019). Avoiding overthinking and learning to forgive were chosen to design for in this project, as few existing products meaningfully support people in engaging in these activities. The Vision in Design approach (Hekkert & van Dijk, 2011) was applied to construct future world views of both activities, in order to create meaningful design goals. Two design strategies were developed for both activities and evaluated by PhD candidates and a design practitioner. This concluded that the strategies meet most of the requirements of a strategy (Wiese et. al., 2020), and could support designers. Recommendations to improve the strategies were composed and presented in the report. The conducted research and developed strategies contributed to existing knowledge by showing how designers can promote sustained well-being on an activity level. Further research should be conducted with more designers to evaluate the strategies’ usefulness in practice more extensively.
Design for Interaction