Introduction

What makes humans truly happy? A question of existential importance to each of us as individuals, as much as it is of professional importance to designers. A question that has gained urgency in an era in which the implicit assumptions of economic expansion driven by materialistic ideologies, which, for decennia, have pervaded our Western cultures, are increasingly questioned, and even rejected. In fact, the materialistic ideology seems to be denounced bankrupt, obsolete and overrun by its apparent and far-reaching social and environmental costs. We are in need for a new ideology; one that is more sustainable in the long run. An ideology that guides us in understanding the nature of the ‘right striving’ both at the level of societies and at the level of the individual person in the pursuit of happiness, providing us with guidance for our design practices. The authors of this book and many designers, teachers and researchers alike, have embraced a modern form of humanism, or humanistic psychology, as a constructive basis for this new ideology. Building on the philosophy of Socrates, advanced by Abraham Maslow, and reinvigorated by the positive psychology movement, the humanistic view adopts a holistic view on human existence, emphasising the positive human potential, all humans’ inherent drive towards self-actualisation, and the process of realising and expressing one’s own capabilities and creativity.

Traditionally, psychologists were reluctant to enter the arena of human happiness because they preferred to avoid ‘value judgements’ and were hesitant to make claims that their research had implications for how people ought to live. But in the last 20 years, impressive theoretical developments emerging within the field of wellbeing research suggest that it may now be possible to make such recommendations – not only on the basis of personal preferences, but on the basis of data. What do these data say about the ‘right’ kinds of goals to strive for? How, and under what circumstances, do such goals contribute to individual wellbeing? How do the goals that are ‘right’ for one individual impact the welfare of others? And, just as important, how can design support the achievement of these goals? These questions are at the heart of this book. By addressing a variety of topics, cases, tools and methods, the authors explored the possibilities of operationalising human happiness in design intentions, processes and outcomes. I was inspired by their optimism, compassion and willingness to be accountable for the impact of their work. I witness a similar excitement when talking to other designers and researchers who enter the arena of happiness-driven design: adopting a humanistic ideology (re)invigorates their passion for design, reconnecting their professional practices to their deeply held personal values.

In the same excitement I sometimes tell our design students that ‘design is an act of love’. Design for subjective wellbeing – for happiness – as an act of love; it may be as simple as that. After all, love is an ‘intense feeling of deep affection’ or a ‘great interest and pleasure in something’, and design is both. Good design is both: It combines deep affection for the people who will use our designs with a profound pleasure in the act of designing. This book has examined design for happiness as an aspiring act of love, as activity, pursuit and outcome. A love that contributes perhaps as much to our own self-actualisation as it does to the happiness impact of our designs.

Seeking a new plot

In 2016, I visited an exhibition that had a lasting impact on me: The Neo-Prehistory 100 Verbs (‘Neo-Preistoria 100 Verbi’) exhibition of the XXI Triennale de Milano. Curated jointly by the eminent Andrea Branzi and Kenya Hara, it was as elegant as it was refined: exhibiting 100 human-made objects and 100 verbs. From Hold, Destroy and Kill, to Restore and Regenerate, each verb was connected to one object, strung together by Branzi and Hara to a journey across the history of humankind. Words which relate to actions which relate to objects. This simple relationship proved to be mesmerising. Each artefact was displayed as a unique and priceless piece, as if the exhibition was presenting human history to an alien from a remote planet. That afternoon, I got lost in the space, which was completely dark and multiplied by mirrors, creating an illusion of boundlessness infinity.

The verbs and related artefacts referred to the variety of human needs: utensils to get food and containers to store it, devices to kill and annihilate, and objects for communication, for writing and for travelling. Proceeding through the exhibition, the verbs related to increasingly sophisticated wishes and to artefacts that pushed forward the limits of the possible, like a winged suit to fly and a technological prosthesis to replace part of the human body. The exhibition expressed our never-ending evolving relationship with tools, from the Stone Age to this present day, destined by both human intelligence and stupidity, compassion and cruelty. A relationship we practise, but we will never oversee or control. The exhibition illustrates that design is in need of a realistic knowledge horizon. In the words of Branzi: ‘One, far from utopian ideas and from the old optimism of a Modernity that has proved incapable of controlling what it induced.’ One in which ‘each individual is an exception and a potential but also a riddle that cannot be solved’ (Branzi & Hara, 2016, p. 14).

Inspired by Branzi’s words, I wonder about the knowledge horizon for happiness-driven design. What is our distinct or unique plot – our convincing discourse that cultivates our sprouting ideology? Developing this plot is one of the key challenges of the positive design movement. Design practices and processes are as diffuse as they are pervasive in the development of humankind. And yet, design is also as simple as a functional artefact, a tool. All 100 objects exhibited in the Neo-Prehistory exhibition are essentially tools, and, as a collection, their portrayal of design history was comprehensive. With design for wellbeing, we have reached a meta-level finale of tool delineation: design as a tool for happiness. It cannot be more definite than this, especially if we broaden the scope to the happiness of society and humanity at large. But what is the verb here? How does one do happiness? The best candidate seems to be to self-actualise or to flourish – ‘To grow or develop in a healthy or vigorous way, especially as the result of a particularly congenial environment’.¹ What makes a particular design a tool for flourishing? As much as we can appreciate the infinite variations of the act of human flourishing, so it is difficult to imagine what specific tools can support it. Let’s take the plant on my windowsill as an example. What does it need to flourish – to become its best possible self? Soil, water, sun and, perhaps, some occasional kind words. Would we consider the plant pot to be a ‘wellbeing design’, or the watering can a tool for flourishing, or the cloth I use to dust its leaves? Probably not. The plant flourishes, and design optimisation is circumstantial or a secondary affair – at most. The same applies to designs that intend to support human flourishing. If we frame wellbeing-driven design as contextual design, as circumstantial, all 100 objects in the Neo-Prehistory exhibition are essentially examples of wellbeing-driven design. All of them purport to enable human actions that may (directly or indirectly) contribute to their flourishing.

It seems that our current plot only tells half of the story, one of intentions. The concepts wellbeing, happiness and flourishing serve us well when describing design objectives. They fall short, however, as design criteria. Any design can be framed as design for wellbeing. All design facilitates some human action or experience, and all actions and experiences can potentially contribute to happiness: a pen is not a tool to write, but a means for meaningful self-expression and creativity. A shoe is not a tool to walk, but a means for discovery and self-development. At times, I have been amazed by the cunning creativity of design students who eloquently leverage concepts of positive psychology when explaining why and how their design project contributes to the wellbeing of the user. More than simply providing us with the language to frame the happiness intentions of our designs, our plot should also enable us to weigh the actual happiness impact, as compared to other concepts and existing designs, including the potential adverse or ill-being effects. In other words, we need a plot that does not only convince by inspiration but also by supporting the critical reflections and dialogue that are needed to make design decisions. Moreover, the plot should provide us with clear and useful criteria that operate as indicators of success. If we neglect to develop this analytical power, a formal knowledge that provides a sound basis for arguing for the rigour and legitimacy of design decisions, positive design may risk sliding into a meta-discourse serving as mere glitter dust to sprinkle our design practices, exploiting assumptions and filtering our observations and questionable extrapolations.

At the same time, we may not be able to develop this plot along the traditional pathways towards scientific rigour. Providing proof of concept, for example, by demonstrating that principles from humanistic psychology have practical potential in design practices, may very well be impossible. Even showing the wellbeing impact of a particular and specific design may not be possible with traditional controlled intervention studies. We cannot develop our plot without also considering the challenge of developing a new form of validation, an alternative for the validity found in evidence-based cause–effect relationships. By focusing on that which we understand through empirical observation (omitting all that is unclear), the need for validation echoes the values of positivism, sharply contrasting with the hermeneutic techniques that prevail in traditional design discourse. The empirical aspiration may be less evident than it seems, given the widely accepted critiques on positivism that precisely those things that are most meaningful to us may not allow for empirical observation. In other words, a design can have a wellbeing impact even if we are not able to prove it. A design may be partly responsible for an individual’s wellbeing, and an individual’s wellbeing may be partly dependent on that design, but this does not necessarily mean that we can expect to find causal relationships. One of our main challenges is to develop a new arsenal of methods to demonstrate and verify the rigour of positive design while respecting the phenomenological nature of design for wellbeing practice.

What hides in the noise

Twenty years ago, Science published an article about a mysterious, ground-breaking, powerful antidepressant (Enserink, 1999). The drug, dubbed MK-869, was invented by the pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. Based on encouraging clinical trials, it was set to become a new millennium drug for millions of people who take antidepressant medication every day. Analysts eagerly predicted that this drug would become a blockbuster, shaking up the $7 billion antidepressant market at the time (Langreth, 1999). However, shortly before launch, Merck suddenly decided to shelve it. What happened? MK-869 was struck by ‘the curse of the placebo effect’. Merck explained in a press release that the company discovered that patients who had received a dummy pill in the clinical trial had done unexpectedly well. In fact, they did practically as well as those on MK-869, wiping out the rationale for the new drug (Enserink, 1999). In other words, a placebo, a look-alike pill made of milk sugar, was almost as effective as the real thing.

The fact that taking a faux drug can powerfully improve some people’s (mental) health has long been considered an embarrassment to the serious practice of pharmacology. This placebo effect was traditionally considered to be nothing more than an inconvenient noise that must be controlled in order to discriminate a valid signal of specific treatment efficacy. Well, not any more. The placebo effect has recently emerged from the shadows of obscurity into the spotlight of stardom. By reframing it to ‘contextual healing’, health researchers have embraced the placebo effect as a profound opportunity for health treatments (see Miller & Kaptchuck, 2008). The contextual healing movement proposes that, instead of focusing exclusively on the therapeutic power of medical technology and thereby ignoring or dismissing context, we should see the context of the clinical encounter as a potential enhancer, and in some cases the primary vehicle, of therapeutic benefit. Factors that may play a role in contextual healing include the environment of the clinical setting, cognitive and affective communication of clinicians, and the ritual of administering treatment.

In the development of our positive design plot, there is something to be learned from this evolution in the ‘health care research plot’. While biomedical science, motivated by the search for specific therapeutic efficacy, has long dominated health care research, contextual healing reaches back to a more humanistic premodern art of medicine that was more inclusive than diagnosing disease and administering effective treatments. Traditional biomedical science had pushed the holistic art of medicine into the corner of irrational charlatanism, and the promise of contextual healing research is to broaden the scope of knowledge development by re-embracing a holistic outlook. Parallel to the challenges of knowledge development in the domain of design for wellbeing, these researchers realise that the increasing scientific attention cannot rely on the methodologies that are used to prove medicine efficacy – the very same methodologies that render contextual healing as noise. Likewise, the effects of design for wellbeing interventions may very well be hidden in the noise. Design for wellbeing does not necessarily purport to relieve symptoms of ill-being but may just as well provide the contextual factors that contribute to human flourishing. Our arsenal of methods should support the idea that the context of an encounter can be the primary vehicle of wellbeing design, not only in design practices but also in the approaches that are used to verify the impact of design on human flourishing.

The prison inside me

Imagine your ideal holiday location. Your dreamed image may not include the experience of being locked up in a five-meter square cell, sleeping on the floor and using a toilet in the corner of the room. And yet, this idea is strangely appealing among many stressed-out South Koreans. To escape from high work pressure, they seek voluntary refuge in a ‘prison hotel’. They act like real inmates, living in an empty cell without possessions or privileges. The prison was established in 2008 with workaholics as the target group. It has 28 cells and, although there are some daytime activities, the inmates spend most of their time alone, in their cells. The building looks like a real prison, inmates wear a uniform and meals are served through a slot in the doors. It is a huge success. Co-founder Noh Jihyang stated about her clients: ‘Most of them were initially resistant because they were told it is jail. But after staying inside, they said it is not the small cell that is the prison, but rather the outside world’ (as cited in Ghani, 2018).

Is this prison hotel a good example of wellbeing focused design? Well, it does provide the visitors with some happiness; a context for reflection, personal growth and bliss. So, yes. But at the same time there is a bitter taste to this happiness when we realise under what conditions a person needs to live to develop the need to lock themselves up in the first place. In South Korea the share of employees working very long hours is much higher than the average; it is the most overworked nation in Asia (OECD Better Life Index, 2019). This is a fundamental issue, a basic context for ill-being, from a social, physical and psychological point of view. The prison may alleviate some of the symptoms, but it doesn’t solve the problem. How do we address tension between people’s pursuit of happiness and the (sometimes harmful) societal environmental conditions of modern societies in our positive design plot? How do we maintain a solid realism that avoids the naivety of utopianism and the gloominess of nihilism? Our narration, as elegant and intelligent as it is, should avoid becoming only self-referential, ignoring the darkness, the violence and the contradictions that accompany human existence in this world, unable to find the means for sustainable peace and shared prosperity.

Parachute suit man

In 1912, 33-year-old Frantz Reichelt jumped to his death from the Paris Eiffel Tower. This was not a suicide, even though he jumped out of his own free will. Reichelt, who was a tailor and inventor, had designed a wearable parachute, a suit for aviators that would convert into a parachute, enabling them to survive a fall should they be forced to leave their aircraft. After some semi-successful tests with a dummy that he dropped from the top of his apartment building, he believed that a suitably high test platform would prove his invention’s efficacy. After several petitions, he got permission to take his dummy to the Eiffel Tower. However, upon arrival, he made it clear that instead of using the dummy he intended to jump personally – to prove the worth of his invention. Despite the desperate attempts of his close friends to convince him to abandon the experiment, he jumped from the tower’s first platform wearing his invention. The parachute failed to deploy and he made a 57-metre free fall.

This horrific stunt made a legend out of Reichelt, aka ‘the parachute suit man’. I marvel at his conviction, his absolute and unreserved trust in his ideas, for which he was willing to pay with his life. And, of course, his stunt was one of infinite idiocy. Luckily, today’s designers know better. Our current mantra is to iterate and prototype. Design follows an evolutionary development, with continuous improvement and working prototypes as the primary measure of progress. At the same time, design does not rely on mere evolution – it takes a stance, though not one as bold as Reichelt’s conviction. Design cannot exist without taking a stance about its purpose, value and meaning. This applies to all design practice and most certainly to design for wellbeing as well. Since the 1960s attempts have been made to incorporate scientific knowledge into the design process. Design researchers started to work out the rational criteria of decision-making, with the ultimate aim optimising decisions. This research now includes the question of what constitutes wellbeing. Not all life goals and aspirations summed across individuals will allow sustainable living patterns and the life conditions of tomorrow that we shape today will certainly affect our wellbeing (Schmuck & Sheldon, 2001). As mentioned in the introduction, design research now has to start asking the question what are the ‘right’ goals to strive for, what are the goals designers should be developing tools for. We boldly have to re-enter the mosh pit of subjectivism, because wellbeing-driven design cannot exist without making claims about how people ought to live, implicitly or explicitly. History has proven many times that design and technology can cause harm and ill-being, in most cases unintentionally. In fact, some of the most destructive design visions have been fuelled by the ambition to contribute to human wellbeing. Indeed, this should not only make us cautious about making wellbeing claims, but it should also stimulate us to actively seek opportunities to develop pragmatic hybrid design methodologies that combine theory-based visionary power with open-minded iterative progression.

It’s love, my friend

‘It’s the economy, stupid’ – more than 25 years ago, this phrase became a famous key slogan of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign against the sitting president, George Bush. Leveraging the then-prevailing recession in the United States, this slogan helped him to successfully unseat Bush. While successful, this slogan represented, even then, an obsolete sentiment. One year before that, in 1991, Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows and Jørgen Randers had published their influential book Beyond the Limits, which, by advocating an urgently needed sustainability revolution, provided a perspective that expressed much more care about people, the earth and the welfare of our future generations. In the concluding chapter (p. 232), they propose five tools to ‘encourage the peaceful restructuring of a system that naturally resists in its own transformation’ towards this revolution: Visioning, Networking, Truth-telling, Learning and Loving: ‘In the quest of a sustainable world, it doesn’t take long before even the most hard-boiled, rational, and practical persons, even those who have not been trained in the language of humanism, begin to speak, with whatever words they can muster, of virtue, morality, wisdom, and love.’

Design has undeniably played its role in the extensive and unmaintainable environmental exploitation that was propelled by the industrial revolution. But design also represents hope, pushing forward the limits of the possible towards a sustainable paradigm. In the positive design plot, designers generate value and meaning that transcends the mere economic value that is recognised by the bare instrumentalism of capitalism. Design for subjective wellbeing – for happiness – as an act of love; it may be as simple as that: love for the students we teach to become designers, love for the people who are affected by design practices and outcomes, and love for the pure bravery of transformation, for the refusal to be held back by the unknown, combined with the humble willingness to listen, observe and reconsider, to be accountable, to redesign and to start over if necessary. Our positive design plot – combining heroism with modesty, requires love.

At the start of this chapter, I mentioned the 100 objects in the Neo-Prehistory exhibition. Not surprisingly, one of the 100 verbs was to love. It was number 22, and it was accompanied by a simple but elegant prehistoric Japanese jade magatame (comma-shaped) bead, that traces back to the hunter-gatherer Jōmon period in Japanese prehistory. The shape represents the significant value in that which transcends oneself. I relish the idea that, to date, archaeologists and historians have been unable to determine the origins of the magatama form, which has resulted in a variety of alternative explanations (see Nishimura, 2018): magatama may have been modelled after the shape of an animal fang, a human foetus or the moon – and some even propose that it might symbolise the shape of the soul. Rather than determining which of these is the correct interpretation, we can enjoy a rich picture painted by the variety of meanings. This is where the love hides, between the lines, beyond both reason and the senses, complicated – and always inspiring.

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank Willy Desmet, my father, for his thoughtful suggestions and for introducing me to the work of Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows and Jørgen Randers, showing me the natural connection between the positive design initiative and the urgently required ‘sustainability revolution’.

References

1. Branzi, A., & Hara, K. (2016). Neo-Preistoria; 100 Verbi. Milano: XX1T.
2. Enserink, M. (1999). Can the placebo be the cure? Science, 284(5412), 238–240.
3. Ghani, F. (2018). Prison inside me: Providing Koreans peace and solitude in a sell (online article). Retrieved from https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/prison-providing-koreans-peace-solitude-cell-180910135056915.html
4. Langreth, R. (1999). Merck hits a stumbling block in testing new antidepressant (online article). The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB917042966767618000
5. Meadows, D.H., Meadows, D.L., & Randers, J. (1992). Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future. Post Mills, VT: Chelsea Green Publishers.
6. Miller, F.G., & Kaptchuk, T.J. (2008). The power of context: reconceptualizing the placebo effect. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 101(5), 222–225.
7. Nishimura, Y. (2018). The evolution of curved beads (magatama) in Jōmon period japan and the development of individual ownership. Asian Perspectives, 57(1), 105–158.
8. OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) (2019). Better Life Index. Retrieved from http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/korea/
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