Design and Culture in the Making of Happiness

Design responds to the needs of individuals, being happiness and wellbeing the subject of an increasing number of studies, which gave rise to a new discipline, Positive Psychology. From these new approaches and concerns related to subjective well-being comes Positive Design, whose objective is to promote the well-being of individuals and communities in connection with a culture of innovation. The cultural routes made accessible through wayfinding systems, make it possible to put Heritage in dialogue, emphasize the culture, memory and history of communities, providing citizens with meaningful experiences that will have an impact both in the short and long run, thus becoming agents for the happiness of individuals. This article discusses the concept of Positive Design based on Positive Psychology, analyzes the evolution and importance of Heritage in the Culture of peoples and communities, questioning how the Wayfinding Systems developed for cultural promotion can integrate the practice of Positive Design and how this contributes to the subjective well-being of individuals

Emotional design and human-robot interaction

Recent years have shown an increase in the importance of emotions applied to the Design field - Emotional Design. In this sense, the emotional design aims to elicit (e.g., pleasure) or prevent (e.g., displeasure) determined emotions, during human product interaction. That is, the emotional design regulates the emotional interaction between the individual and the product (e.g., robot). Robot design has been a growing area whereby robots are interacting directly with humans in which emotions are essential in the interaction. Therefore, this paper aims, through a non-systematic literature review, to explore the application of emotional design, particularly on Human-Robot Interaction. Robot design features (e.g., appearance, expressing emotions and spatial distance) that affect emotional design are introduced. The chapter ends with a discussion and a conclusion.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Mood measurement with Pick-A-Mood:Review of current methods and design of a pictorial self-report scale

\u3cp\u3eThis paper introduces Pick-A-Mood, a character-based pictorial scale for reporting and expressing moods. Pick-A-Mood consists of three characters that each express eight mood states, representing four main categories: excited and cheerful (for energised-pleasant), irritated and tense (for energised-unpleasant), relaxed and calm (for calm-pleasant), and bored and sad (for calm-unpleasant). Using Pick-A-Mood requires little effort on the part of respondents, making it suitable for design research applications in which people often have little time or motivation to report their moods. Contrary to what is often assumed, mood and emotion are distinct phenomena with different measurable manifestations. These differences are discussed, and a review of existing methods is provided, indicating to what extent current methods that measure emotion are suitable for measuring mood. The development and validation of Pick-A-Mood is reported, and application examples and research opportunities are discussed.\u3c/p\u3

Is this a design-worthy dilemma? Identifying relevant and inspiring concern conflicts as input for user-centred design

Personal dilemmas can be valuable starting points for user-centred design. Since dilemmas prevail in everyday life, designers can identify many dilemmas relevant for a given design brief. It can therefore be a challenge to choose a target dilemma as a means to frame an appropriate problem space. To address this challenge, this paper proposes seven qualities of 'design-worthy' dilemmas. These key qualities were derived from a cross-comparison of four dilemma-driven design cases, and were clustered in three categories: 1) relevance for target users; 2) potential to inspire design ideas; 3) meaningful formulation of conflicting concerns. The qualities of design-worthy dilemmas explicate the considerations designers have when selecting a target dilemma, and thus, they can facilitate introspection and discussion in problem framing. In addition, the case studies demonstrate the main activities involved in dilemma-driven design, namely discovery, definition, and application

Design for broken hearts : an exploration of how design is involved in coping with relationship loss

Relationship loss is a fundamental life experience for all human beings. It is the experience of losing someone significant such as a parent, friend or lover. Whether it is through the breakup of a romantic relationship, the passing away of a family member, or in other ways, coping with loss is inevitable for all individuals. Besides inevitable, coping with loss is highly individual because people differ strongly in terms of how they experience loss and in terms of the strategies they use to cope with their loss. Loss is a frequently studied subject in various disciplines such as philosophy, psychology and sociology. However, in the design field, loss is relatively less explored. This study aims to explore how design is involved in the experiences of loss and in loss coping. The main proposition in this study is that even though design cannot solve the problem at hand (the loss is a given fact), it can support people in their coping processes. A phenomenological study with 18 participants is reported to understand the roles design plays in people’s loss coping experience. The study consisted of two phases: a sensitizing phase and an interview phase. The results indicated that design can intervene people’s loss experience, and that it can do so both by facilitating and impeding the loss coping process. On the basis of the results, seven main functions are proposed that design can have in the loss coping process