Designing Moments of Meaning and Pleasure. Experience Design and Happiness

IntroductionThe pursuit of individual happiness 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 happiness has gained significant momentum (e.g., Kahneman, 1999, 2011; Lopez & Snyder, 2009; Lyubomirsky, 2007; Seligman, 2011).Borrowing from Lyubomirsky (2007), we understand happiness as the "experience 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 an 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 happiness requires the acquisition of positive experiences on a day-to-day basis and a more general assessment of life as positive and meaningful. Obviously, happiness 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 an overview) that a good part of happiness 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 an exciting but challenging opportunity for Industrial Design, Product Design, and Interaction Design: Should it not be possible to "design 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 happiness in mind. We start with a clarification of what an 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 an 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 an 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 an 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 an "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. …