Design for Well-being on the Smartphone A practice of design for well-being theory on smartphone-related design projects
Keywords Well-being, Virtue, Smartphone
Abstract This paper introduces the design for well-being theory developed by Desmet & Pohlmeyer (2013) and the practice of it during real design projects. The main research question is how to implement this theory into practical projects in smartphone industry, and make the final design contribute to people’s well-being. The theory has been tried out in two exploratory projects. The first one is a joint master project with the collaboration of Nokia and TU Delft, aiming at designing a product/service which can strengthen the Windows Phone ecosystem. The second project collaborates with Fairphone, aiming at designing the UX strategy for its future product.
Introduction Design for well-being is becoming a more and more popular topic nowadays. After gaining enough food, secure and wealth, well-being is the final pursuing of human beings. Designers should feel the responsibility to make their designs contribute to people’s well-being. Smartphone is a product people use every day, which can highly contribute to people’s well-being. However, after several practical experiences within the smartphone industry including Nokia Product Innovation Team (Beijing), Microsoft Windows Phone Design Studio (Redmond) and Fairphone (Amsterdam), no developed theory is found to support “design for well-being” although this topic is widely discussed. In academic world, Desmet & Pohlmeyer (2013) from Delft Institute of Positive Design have developed a Design for Well-being Framework to guide designers to design products on the perspective of people’s well-being. However, this theory is relatively new and needed to be validated after more practices. There are three main challenges to implement this theory into real projects. The first challenge is to discover the relevant elements within the well-being framework in the project context. After finding the relevant elements, the second challenge is how to select related elements for the final design. The third challenge is how to make the final design associate with the selected elements and contribute to people’s well-being. In this paper, the Design for Well-being theory has been tried out into two exploratory projects – TU Delft Joint Master Project with Nokia and a graduation project with Fairphone. In the Joint Master Project, six students from all three Master's programs of Industrial Design Engineering at the TU Delft (Strategic Product Design, Design for Interaction, Integrated Product Design) work together on a design project for Nokia. The aim is to develop a new product-service concept that complements the flagship line of Nokia devices and focuses on an innovative forward thinking UX. The second project collaborates with Fairphone, a social enterprise with the aim to develop a smartphone which focuses on social and environmental sustainability. The assignment is to design the user experience strategy for the second generation of Fairphone, which wants to build an enduring relationship between user and product.
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The design for well-being theory has guided the designer to go through the whole design procedure in these two projects, including develop sensitizing booklet, interview guide and questionnaire, cluster user research findings and generate the concept. It also helps designers articulate the reasons of the final design when presenting to the clients, making the final design more convincing and easier to understand.
Literature Study Based on the design for well-being framework, three main elements which can contribute to people’s well-being are: pleasure (experiencing positive affect), personal significance (pursuing personal goals) and virtue (being a morally good person).
Figure 1 Design for well-being framework (adapted from Desmet & Pohlmeter, 2013)
1. Design for pleasure: The focus of ‘design for pleasure’ is on here and now, the presence of positive affect and the absence of negative affect. Designers can design a product/service which can evoke positive feelings or reduce negative feelings, like being relaxed, having good food, being free from problems. 2. Design for personal significance: Personal goals and aspirations, such as going to a dream school, winning a prize or running a marathon, can bring happiness to human beings. Personal significance can be derived from past achievements or a progress toward a future goal. Products can be resources that people use to attain their goals, like instruments for musicians or sports shoes for athletes. 3. Design for virtue: Virtue is a positive trait deemed to be morally good and thus is valued as a foundation of principle and good moral being. It implies what is good and what is bad regardless what people enjoy or strive for. Virtue is an idealized human value that is operationalized in many ways. Design can support people’s efforts to be virtues. Virtues are the core characteristics values by moral philosophers and religious thinkers: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance and transcendence. Character strengths are the psychological ingredients that define the virtues. For example, the virtue of wisdom can be achieved through strengths like creativity, curiosity and love of learning. These strengths are similar in that they all involve the acquisition and use of knowledge, but they are also distinct. Seligman (2004) sorted virtues into six categories with related character strengths, which are shown in table 1. 2
Table 1 Virtues and Character Strength (adapted from Seligman, 2004)
Virtues
Transcendence
Temperance Justice
Character Strengths
Appreciation; Gratitude; Hope; Humor; Religiousness;
Forgiveness; Fairness; Modesty; Teamwork; Prudence; Leadership; Selfregulation;
Wisdom & Knowledge Creativity; Curiosity; Openminded; Love of learning; Perspective;
Courage
Humanity
Authenticity; Bravery; Persistence; Zest;
Kindness; Love; Social; Intelligence;
Virtue is one crucial element to people’s well-being. But it is hard to be discovered and designed for. It is also a new perspective for designers to evaluate the impact of the design. In the two exploratory projects, virtue plays an important role to connect to research findings and final design.
Design exploration Exploratory project 1: Joint Master Project for Nokia This project focuses on developing future product and services for the Windows Phone ecosystem. The goal is to improve people’s well-being by developing tools that create a more enabling and engaging working experience. Despite the existing services that enhance people’s work-life balance, not much consideration has been taken into people’s well-being in the working environment, although most people spend one-third of their daily time on work. With the recent development in emerging technology towards ubiquitous computing, it is high time to leverage its benefits to innovate and enhance the ways people work. How to make the final design enable, stimulate, and inspire users to engage in meaningful activities, thus contributing to their well-being at work, is the final goal this project wants to achieve. After defining the design goal, the first challenge is to discover the relevant elements within the wellbeing framework in the context research phase. A broad and generic survey is conducted in the beginning, which asks participants to write down important activities at work, what they do with technology in work & life and three things which make them happy at work & life. The answers are coded and clustered, as presented in figure 2. The user persona becomes clearer and elements of people’s happiness during working are generated from the survey outcome.
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Figure 2 Quantitative Research Outcome
Based on the insights from survey outcome, qualitative user study is conducted to be able to understand the deeper reason of people’s happiness at work. Since some questions about happiness are not easy for people to answer directly without a certain time of reflection, a sensitizing booklet in the form of a 3day-long dairy is sent to the participants before the interview. It asks participants to fill out their happy/unhappy moments during work and life, which can facilitate the discussion during the in-person interview.
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Figure 3 Happiness calendar in sensitizing booklet
Following this, eight one-to-one semi-structured interviews are conducted to dive deeper into the identified happiness reasons to elicit deep yet widely felt insights in the domain of working experiences. Table 2 categorizes the reasons which trigger people’s happiness in work into the three elements of people’s well-being. Table 2 User research findings
Elements of well-being Related reasons
Pleasure Team interaction; Humor in work;
Personal Significance Solve a problem; Reach a goal work; Positive Feedbacks; Learning activities;
Virtue Empathy in teamwork; Helping colleagues in work and life; Sharing goals with colleagues in life and work; Remind people of their values;
Each finding can be a starting point for the final design. After judging the future possibilities and significance level of each direction, the team decides to focus on virtue elements from the research outcome, since virtue is a challenging and meaningful area which hasn’t been explored much in previous studies. Six key words are generated as the central topic of the final design: gratitude, appreciation, teamwork, open-minded, kindness and empathy. All of them are important virtues based on the human virtue category by Seligman (2004). The design direction – enhance people’s happiness at work - can reach a deeper, sustainable and more holistic level if the final design enables and enhances those virtues from research insights.
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Figure 4 Virtue platform generated from user study
The final concept is an app which encourages the colleagues to help each other on small problems in work and life inside the company. Users can offer or receive help anonymously through this app. It facilitates people’s positive feeling caused by gratitude and kindness. Once the problem is solved, the personal information of help giver and receiver will be revealed, thus helping people build new or tighter connections with their colleagues. The users will become more open-minded and empathetic on their colleagues. The teamwork will also become more efficient in the end, which not only contributes to employees’ well-being, but also leads to better company operation. The design for well-being theory has successfully guided the team through the whole project. The six key virtues from the user study also help the team to articulate the reason why this design could contribute to people’s well-being when presenting to the client.
Figure 5 Final Design - Nokia Dots
Exploratory project 2: Design the UX strategy for Fairphone Based on the experience from the previous project, this project also takes the design for well-being framework as the guidance to conduct user research and concept development. Fairphone is a social enterprise with the aim to develop a smartphone designed and produced by putting social values first. It pursues this goal by opening up the supply chain, understanding how products are 6
made and being part of the industry in the design, production, distribution and recycling of their product. The first generation of Fairphone has reached a big success by conveying the brand value to the customers through different marketing channels. But on the design perspective, it still lacks integration of the “Fairphone� brand value into the hardware/software design. Therefore, a general UX strategy is needed to guide the software/hardware design, and deliver a consistent user experience. This project focuses on designing the UX strategy for the second generation of Fairphone devices, with the goal to develop an enduring relationship between users and their products. This project succeeds several research methods which are proofed to be effective in the first project, like sensitizing booklet with happiness dairy and open questions in online survey which ask people’s happy/unhappy moments with their Fairphone. A virtue platform is also made to explain the key virtues which are generated from research findings and to be facilitated by the final design. In the beginning of this project, qualitative and quantitative research are conducted in order to have a deep understanding of Fairphone users and the related well-being elements within the project context. During the qualitative research phase, interviewees will receive a sensitizing booklet three days before the interview. The booklet asks interviewees to write down their basic information, the reasons why they like/dislike Fairphone, 3-day dairy about their happy/unhappy moments with their phone and their imagination on future Fairphone. The booklet is an effective tool to help interviewees reflect on their behaviors with their Fairphone before the interview. It has triggered a lot of discussions and deeper insights during the interview.
Figure 6 Sensitizing booklet with happiness calendar
One-on-one semi-structured interviews with open-ended questions are held after interviewees finish their booklets. A transcript is made after each interview. A virtue platform is generated based on the 7
user research outcome under the guidance of design for well-being theory. Based on the virtue framework developed by Seligman (2004), the key virtues from the research findings are illustrated in table 3. Table 3 Key virtues from research outcome
Key Virtues Fairness Curiosity Love of learning Hope
Explanation Users love the fairness of Fairphone, including social fairness and environmental fairness. They feel proud to use it. Fairphone users are curious to know why the phone is fair and the problems of the current industry. 70% Fairphone users have a bachelor degree or higher. They love to learn new knowledge and share with their friends. Most Fairphone users are optimistic about the world. They believe they can make a movement. Starting by buying a phone, Fairphone users are expecting a fair economy and a sustainable world.
These virtues are what Fairphone users have and could be key topics for the final design. The design statement is defined after the user study outcome – the design should make people feel proud to build an enduring relationship with their product by guiding them to better understand the product. Pride is one of human’s positive feelings (Desmet, 2012). Pride can also make users willing to share the idea of Fairphone to others, which aligns with Fairphone’s strategy – to encourage more people to join the movement. The final design – “Mr. C” - creates an engaging and efficient communication channel between the user and the product. It helps the user better understand the product first, thus creating a positive feeling of the product. In the end an enduring and sustainable relationship will be built between user and product. Mr. C implies a capacitor inside Fairphone. It contains Tantalum – a precious mineral from conflict free mines in DR Congo. It will pop up on the user’s phone during the evening and weekend. If the user “catches” it, Mr. C will provide small tips about mining, designing, manufacturing and recycling process, thus helping the user to better understand their phone and creating an empathy on the product.
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Figure 7 Mr. C can guide the user to understand their phone
Users can also go into a Mr. C app to check the product’s journey and the information of other components inside the phone, including the cost, supplier, use frequency and life cycle. People’s virtues like curiosity and love of learning can be triggered by this design. After understanding better about the product, the virtues like fairness and hope can be enhanced. Because users know that they are joining the movement to make a sustainable world. In the end, people’s well-being level will grow as their virtues are triggered and enhanced by the final design.
Figure 8 Mr. C app inside Fairphone
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Conclusion The two projects have shown how to connect design for well-being theory with real design projects. In the beginning of a design project, this theory is a useful guide to discover the relevant elements within the well-being framework in the project context. For example, the happiness calendar is used in the previous two projects to collect the reasons of people’s happy moment. Then the reasons can be clustered into three categories in the design for well-being theory, like the key virtues found in the first project – “gratitude”, “appreciation” and “fairness”, “love of learning” in the second project. Those key virtues initiate a starting point for the final design. When presenting the final design, the related key virtues can help designer to better articulate why the design can contribute to people’s well-being. This theory not only provides designers a new perspective to understand the design assignment and conduct the design research, but also makes the final design more convincing to the client, and meaningful to the user and human flourishing.
References Desmet, P. (2012). Faces of Product Pleasure: 25 Positive Emotions in Human-Product Interactions. International Journal of Design, 6(2). Desmet, P. M., & Pohlmeyer, A. E. (2013). Positive design: An introduction to design for subjective wellbeing. International Journal of Design, 7(3), 5-19. Seligman, M. E. (2004). Character strengths and virtues: A handbook and classification (Vol. 1). Oxford University Press.
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