Positive Experience Design and Impact-Centered Design

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This entry is adapted from the peer-reviewed paper 10.3390/su152215829

The pursuit of sustainable well-being is one of the research objectives of positive experience design.

impact-centered design sustainable design positive experience design model

1. Introduction

In response to shifting human development patterns following globalization, the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) called for development to address broader societal needs while addressing climate and environmental change ^[1]. Society, economy, and environment are the three pillars of sustainability; this means that sustainable development seeks a win–win situation of “economic growth” and “social and ecological development” ^[2]. In recent decades, the search for a more sustainable approach to development has become increasingly important in international politics and economics ^[3]. Social attention to sustainability has also helped transform design ideas. More design methods that consider social and ecological sustainability have emerged, such as nature-centered design ^[4], life-centered design ^[5], and value-sensitive design ^[6]. With this development, human-centered design is increasingly showing its limitations regarding sustainability.

In the field of positive experience design, researchers have been exploring how design can contribute to sustainable people’s well-being and achieve long-term goals. In recent studies, the user-centered research perspective has gradually changed, and scholars are beginning to explore how to design long-range positive impacts to achieve users’ long-term personal and social well-being. For example, Kermavnar has designed a serious game about COVID-19 knowledge to influence users’ behaviors and attitudes through short-term experiences ^[7]. In a framework of artificial intelligence systems established by Maden to support community well-being, more attention is paid to influencing residents’ happiness through community construction ^[8].

2. Positive Experience Design

Positive experience design, derived from positive psychology, is a possibility-driven positive value-creation activity that provides pleasant and meaningful interactive experiences for individuals and communities via innovative products, services, and systems. Thus, this design promotes individual well-being, community prosperity, and a flourishing future ^[9]. To meet user’s needs and optimize the experience process, scholars have developed a series of design models around positive experience design, as shown in Table 1.

Table 1. The related literature on positive experience design.

Authors	Contributions	Source
Desmet P.M.A. (2015)	Regulating mood: The two-factor mood model helps designers identify and describe users’ moods to develop designs related to mood regulation.	^[10]
Peters D. et al. (2018)	Changing behavior: The METUX model helps designers measure and design basic psychological needs related to user behavior.	^[11]
Wiese L. et al. (2020)	Enhancing motivation: The multi-stage design framework model provides a visual design method to achieve user happiness by providing positive activities.	^[12]
Wu C. et al. (2021)	Enriching experience: The positive experience design model of IoT intelligent products guides designers to design for individual pleasure experience, personal goal realization, group need satisfaction, and group relationship harmony.	^[13]
Chen, K. (2022)	Improving cognition: The emotional interaction design framework model guides designers to improve user awareness by enhancing users’ emotional experiences.	^[14]
Perrino C. H. et al. (2020)	Continuation of the positive experience cycle: The model designed for temporary harmony guides designers to create positive experiences from the perspective of changing users’ cognitive memories and plans.	^[15]

Desmet brought eight mood types into the two-factor mood model to help designers identify and describe users’ moods and carry out the design related to mood regulation ^[10]. Peters believed that encouraging users to accomplish tasks and develop behavioral habits can improve their happiness and developed the Motivation, Engagement, and Thriving in User Experience (METUX) model to help designers measure the basic psychological needs that support user behavior ^[11]. Wiese built a multi-stage design framework for sustainable well-being, providing a visual design path for creating positive activities through product interactions to achieve users’ happiness ^[12]. Wu contributed a positive experience design model for intelligent products of the Internet of Things (IoT), which covers the design path from pleasurable experiences to personal significance and group relationships ^[13]. Chen developed an emotional interaction design framework model for children’s application development, guiding designers to enrich users’ pleasure and cognition by enhancing users’ emotional experiences ^[14]. Perrino‘s model, designed for temporal harmony, revealed the potential impact of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors on users’ current positive experiences within the positive experience cycle, inspiring designers to improve positive experiences by changing users’ cognitive memory and plans ^[15]. So far, the design models related to positive experiences are mainly focused on users’ perceptions. They are committed to providing positive experiences for individuals or groups through product interaction to influence their mood, behavior, attitude, and cognition and improve subjective well-being.

3. Impact-Centered Design

As early as the 1990s, American psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner noted that there is a two-way, dynamic interaction between individuals and their living environments. Furthermore, recent studies have demonstrated that environmental problems and social and economic changes affect the health and well-being of individuals ^[16]. Researchers have investigated the relationship between users and their external environments to achieve sustainable well-being. For instance, Norman proposed the concept of humanity-centered design, which focuses on the long-term impact between societies and ecosystems ^[17]. More-than-human-centered design focuses on the interdependence of people and biological systems and seeks design methods that harmonize positive human experiences with the environment’s needs ^[18]. Sustainable design emphasizes integrating social, environmental, and economic impacts in designing products, systems, or services, balancing people’s needs with environmental and ethical concerns ^[19]. Therefore, Fokkinga believed that designers need to consider creating positive impacts on individual and social well-being in addition to users’ goals, feelings, abilities, and practices, and defined this coherent design intention as an “impact-centered design” ^[20].

The Oxford Dictionary defines “impact” as the powerful effect that something has on somebody or something. To illustrate the link between technical characteristics and happiness factors, Calvo divided the key factors affecting happiness into ego, sociability, and detachment ^[21]. For the design methodology, Cloutier considered that personal well-being is related to environmental conditions and social connections and proposed the Sustainability Through Happiness Framework, which is based on the vision of future happiness for sustainable design ^[22]. Weijs-Perrée found that transient experiences depended on the environment’s objective features and the individual’s subjective characteristics, and the short-lived experience ultimately influenced the individual’s sense of well-being through long-term experience ^[23]. In the impact-centered design process, designers need to comprehensively consider the interaction between users, society, and the environment and take the positive impact as the design goal. The impact can be further divided into two dimensions: (1) short-term impacts: changing users’ behaviors, attitudes, emotions, etc., through a short experience; (2) long-term impacts: making long-term impacts on users or stakeholders through sustainable experiences, with the combined effect gradually changing their qualities of life and social well-being. Shaping prolonged positive impacts can provide users with a more sustainable sense of well-being, and long-term impacts should be the main design goal during the impact-centered design process.

Table 2 presents some research details on impact-centered design.

Table 2. The related literature of design impact.

Authors	Contributions	Source
Norman, D.A. (2023)	Humanity-centered design: Long-term impacts between people, societies, and ecosystems should be viewed from a long-term and systematic perspective.	^[17]
Poikolainen Rosén, A. et al. (2022)	More-than-human-centered design: People and organisms systematically interact to achieve ecological sustainability.	^[18]
Kristensen, H. S. et al. (2022)	Sustainable value propositions in product-service systems: Social, environmental, and economic impacts need to be integrated into the design process of products, systems, or services.	^[19]
Fokkinga, S. F. et al. (2020)	An impact-centered design framework was established, including the direct and indirect psychological, social, and behavioral effects resulting from the interaction of people and products.	^[20]
Calvo, R. A. et al. (2018)	Divide the main factors in technology that influence happiness into three categories: personal experience, social relationships, and altruism.	^[21]
Cloutier, S. et al. (2017)	Environmental conditions and social connections influence individuals’ feelings of well-being. Therefore, an approach to system design based on a vision of the future was proposed.	^[22]
Weijs-perrée, M. et al. (2019)	Transient experiences are influenced by the objective characteristics of the environment and the subjective characteristics of the individuals, ultimately affecting people’s happiness through long-term impacts.	^[23]

Impact-centered design is a design concept that focuses on the long-term impact of design, with sustainable and broader well-being as the design goal. Positive experience design is driven by the pursuit of prolonged personal and social well-being. Therefore, the shift from user-centered to impact-centered approaches is the current trend in positive experience design. Although the concept of impact-centered design has been proposed, no scholar has developed relevant design models and methods for its execution. In addition, as positive experience design focuses on improving the well-being of users and society, less attention has been paid to environmental impact in research.

References

United Nations. Sustainable Development Goals. 2015. Available online: http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/ (accessed on 2 December 2022).
Purvis, B.; Mao, Y.; Robinson, D. Three Pillars of Sustainability: In Search of Conceptual Origins. Sustain. Sci. 2019, 14, 681–695.
Schönborn, A.; Junge, R. Redefining Ecological Engineering in the Context of Circular Economy and Sustainable Development. Circ. Econ. Sustain. 2021, 1, 375–394.
Van der Ryn, S. Nature-Centered Design. In Design for an Empathic World; Island Press: Washington, DC, USA, 2013; pp. 47–70.
Borthwick, M.; Tomitsch, M.; Gaughwin, M. From Human-Centred to Life-Centred Design: Considering Environmental and Ethical Concerns in the Design of Interactive Products. J. Responsible Technol. 2022, 10, 100032.
Borning, A.; Muller, M. Next Steps for Value Sensitive Design. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New York, NY, USA, 5 May 2012; pp. 1125–1134.
Kermavnar, T.; Visch, V.T.; Desmet, P.M.A. Games in Times of a Pandemic: Structured Overview of COVID-19 Serious Games. JMIR Serious Games 2023, 11, e41766.
Van der Maden, W.; Lomas, D.; Hekkert, P. A Framework for Designing AI Systems That Support Community Wellbeing. Front. Psychol. 2023, 13, 1011883.
Wu, C. Product Service and Positive Experience Design; China Textile Press: Beijing, China, 2022; pp. 43–45.
Desmet, P.M.A. Design for Mood: Twenty Activity-Based Opportunities to Design for Mood Regulation. Int. J. Des. 2015, 9, 1–19.
Peters, D.; Calvo, R.A.; Ryan, R.M. Designing for Motivation, Engagement and Wellbeing in Digital Experience. Front. Psychol. 2018, 9, 797.
Wiese, L.; Pohlmeyer, A.E.; Hekkert, P. Design for Sustained Wellbeing through Positive Activities—A Multi-Stage Framework. Multimodal Technol. Interact. 2020, 4, 71.
Wu, C.; Xu, H.; Liu, Z. The Approaches of Positive Experience Design on IoT Intelligent Products. KSII Trans. Internet Inf. Syst. 2021, 15, 1798–1813.
Chen, K. An Interactive Design Framework for Children’s Apps for Enhancing Emotional Experience. Interact. Comput. 2022, 34, 85–98.
Perrino, C.H.; Burmester, M. Designing for Temporal Harmony: Exploring the Well-Being Concept for Designing the Temporal Dimension of User Experience. Multimodal Technol. Interact. 2020, 4, 66.
Zhao, W.; Chang, M.; Yu, L. Health and Human Wellbeing in China: Do Environmental Issues and Social Change Matter? Front. Psychol. 2022, 13, 860321.
Norman, D.A. Design for a Better World: Meaningful, Sustainable, Humanity Centered; The MIT Press: Cambridge, UK, 2023; pp. 181–186.
Poikolainen Rosén, A.; Normark, M.; Wiberg, M. Towards More-Than-Human-Centred Design: Learning from Gardening. Int. J. Des. 2022, 16, 21–36.
Kristensen, H.S.; Remmen, A. A framework for sustainable value propositions in product-service systems. J. Clean. Prod. 2019, 223, 25–35.
Fokkinga, S.F.; Desmet, P.; Hekkert, P. Impact-Centered Design: Introducing an Integrated Framework of the Psychological and Behavioral Effects of Design. Int. J. Des. 2020, 14, 97–116.
Calvo, R.A.; Peters, D. Positive Computing: Technology for Wellbeing and Human Potential; MIT Press: Cambridge, UK, 2014; pp. 133–136.
Cloutier, S.; Pfeiffer, D. Happiness: An Alternative Objective for Sustainable Community Development. In Handbook of Community Well-Being Research; Springer: Berlin, Germany, 2017; pp. 85–96.
Weijs-Perrée, M.; Dane, G.; van den Berg, P.V.D.; van Dorst, M.V. A Multi-Level Path Analysis of the Relationships between the Momentary Experience Characteristics, Satisfaction with Urban Public Spaces, and Momentary- and Long-Term Subjective Wellbeing. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2019, 16, 3621.

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Chunmao Wu

Xuan Wang

Pei Li

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Update Date: 16 Nov 2023

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1. Introduction

2. Positive Experience Design

3. Impact-Centered Design

References