Death and Catharsis: Re-defining Pleasure by Design

In designing for positive emotional experience, there is no common definition of pleasure as used within the design professions. In addition to the idiosyncratic nature of human-product interactions, the tendency toward emotive design based on surface-level details for short-lived positive reactions must be broadened to address more sustained, reflective responses to products, as interpreted in context of use. A relatively unexplored area of design and emotion is constituted around ritual artifacts. For example, design research concerning the processes and products associated with death may seem at first to have little connection to a discussion of pleasure in design. Yet, the artifacts and rituals surrounding our last rite of passage can be argued as relevant to pleasure both in terms of their ability to facilitate positive memories and the need to mourn, and in reducing the effects of psychological pain through therapeutic or cathartic experience. The insights promoted through this research discussion suggest the need for broader interpretations of pleasure, and the benefits of re-defining pleasure in applications of design and emotion

Death: artefact and process in the last rite of passage

Bibliography: p. 72-75

Towards emotional well-being by design 17 opportunities for emotion regulation for user-centered healthcare design

Recent attention has been given to the role of emotion regulation in promoting well-being. Although various approaches have been established to design for emotion in design research and HCI, there is only little knowledge on how to support the process of regulating user emotions through design. The paper introduces a framework that delineates 17 emotion regulation strategies based on the theories of emotion regulation. The framework supports an understanding of emotion regulation strategies by enabling designers to compare differences and overlaps of the strategies. The paper describes the framework and its development process along with design examples. Implications and future research steps are discussed

Peer feedback processes in the game industry

A wide variety of design strategies, tools, and processes are used across the game industry. Prior work has shown that these processes are often collaborative, with experts in different domains contributing to different parts of the whole. However, the ways in which these professionals give and receive peer feedback have not yet been studied in depth. In this paper we present results from interviews with industry professionals at two game studios, describing the ways they give feedback. We propose a new, six step process that describes the full feedback cycle from making plans to receive feedback to reflecting and acting upon that feedback. This process serves as a starting point for researchers studying peer feedback in games, and allows for comparison of processes across different types of studios. It will also help studios formalize their understanding of their own processes and consider alternative processes that might better fit their needs