This paper presents Bloom, a low-tech interactive artifact designed to enhance in-person social interactions among emerging adults. Drawing upon emotion regulation theories, the development of Bloom explores how multiple Positive Emotion Regulation (PER) techniques can be incorporated into an artifact that can effectively enhance users’ subjective well-being in their routines. By grounding on autobiographical research through design, we discuss the design methodology employed to develop a prototype that supports five PER techniques, along with key design features, and experiences of using Bloom. The chosen PER techniques are as follows: (1) being immersed and absorbed, (2) engaging in a collective, (3) creating a savoring atmosphere, (4) sharing the positive experience with others, and (5) infusing ordinary events with positive meaning. Through daily observations and reflections, we discuss key design features that have proven critical in engaging ourselves in PER, the benefits of utilizing diverse PER techniques to enhance our well-being, and implications for future behavioral intervention technologies.

This paper investigates how negative emotions arising from anxious attachment can be effectively mitigated through the design of interactions and how design-supported attachment stabilization can contribute to well-being. Anxious attachment is a type of attachment that is prominent in individuals who are highly dependent on others and have lower self-esteem in interpersonal relationships (eg, I need constant reassurance from my partner to feel secure.). To illustrate how interactions can be systematically designed to alleviate anxious attachment, the paper presents the development of a self-administered interactive device that supports users in the contexts of underachievement, self-depreciation, and future worries. The development process was informed by a diary study with individuals with anxious attachment that explored daily coping strategies, and a design workshop with design professionals that generated a set of design strategies. A ten-day field evaluation study showed the device’s effectiveness in alleviating negative emotions associated with anxious attachment through three aspects: facilitating explicit emotion awareness, encouraging positive self-perception, and introspecting the problems at hand. These positive effects were more pronounced when experiencing moderate and low intense negative emotions. This paper discusses implications for design practice with future research directions.

Upcycling, as a way to reutilise resources, offers a promising alternative to production and consumption based on virgin materials. Despite the growing academic and industrial interest in recent years, there is a lack of large-scale cross-country or cross-regional studies that systematically investigate influencing factors for consumer upcycling behaviour. By drawing on social psychological theories of interpersonal behaviour and planned behaviour, this study investigated predictors of upcycling behaviour in five highly industrialised countries of three continents: Australia, Canada, Germany, UK, and USA. Results showed that intention and perceived behavioural control (confidence in abilities) were the most important factors for upcycling. Theoretical and practical implications from this study are discussed in the context of efforts to scale up global upcycling.

Central to the present paper is the question of how designers can be supported to deliberately facilitate positive emotional experiences. Related to this, the paper provides an overview of the research on design for positive emotions, its issues, and opportunities for further investigations. The practical relevance of transcending the notion of generalised pleasure is discussed, highlighting the benefits of developing and applying a nuanced understanding of positive emotions. Overarching challenges and opportunities that underlie in stimulating such understanding are delineated along with the review of characteristics of positive emotions. Ethical issues of designing for positive emotions are reflected regarding its implications for well-being with suggestions to resolve them. Besides, the paper discusses emerging research directions, ranging from design tools to distinguish diverse positive emotions, the added value of exploring expressive interaction qualities of positive emotions, to advantages of involving tool users (e.g., designers and project stakeholders) in the development process.

This paper reveals how the patterns of positive user experience in relation to a product vary over the usage life cycle, from before purchase to disposal/repurchase, and in what way the positive experience interacts with demographic factors. As constructs of positive user experience, five attributes of positive user experience were adopted in the study: aesthetics; instrumentality; association; self-focused identification; and relationship-focused identification. Love letter, UX curve and retrospective interviews were used as methods. A total of 49 people participated in the study. The results indicate that the critical attributes of positive user experiences differed to a large extent according to the phase of product usage. However, these differences were not significant in terms of gender and age. Among the five attributes, instrumentality played a main role in positive experiences throughout the product usage life cycle, while the importance of the other attributes tended to decrease after first-time usage. The findings highlight implications for design practice that can aid the process of designing for long-lasting positive user experience throughout the product usage life cycle.

Increasingly, the unboxing experience is regarded as a critical moment in product appraisal. As such, designers and companies should pay more attention to product packaging due to this increased interest in the momentary unboxing experience. In this study, we examine aesthetic interaction’s influence upon emotional and semantic appraisals of the packaged product at the moment of unboxing. Three factors of aesthetic interaction were adopted and used in the design of packaging stimuli: freedom of interaction, interaction pattern, and richness of motor actions. The findings indicated that differences in aesthetic interaction between the three packaging designs evoked particular positive emotions and delivered different semantic appraisals of the packaged products. Thus, the study provides design researchers and practitioners with an increased understanding of how aesthetic interaction can be leveraged in packaging design to enhance the unboxing experience.

User-centred design and co-design are nowadays prevalent in product design. However, the number of product returns in consumer electronic industry is continuously increasing. Most complaints are not technical in nature but have to do with non-technical or ‘soft’ problems. Our study investigates these problems with electronic devices in relation to design properties, characteristics of users and their follow-up (re)actions. The results show that people massively complain about a large variety of products, from computers to e-book readers, and from washing machines to vacuum cleaners. Soft problems are the outcome of the interaction between user characteristics and design properties. Whether users take action upon their complaints also depend on their background. The results have to be translated into a design language.

Despite the enormous progress in technology and design over the last decades, consumer dissatisfaction is increasing, mainly because of soft usability problems: problems that have nothing to do with technical failure. In earlier studies, types of soft usability problems have been influenced on the one hand by product properties and on the other hand by user characteristics. These studies are all based on retrospective data. However, common practice in the manufacturing industry is to test their prototypes through user trials, which means testing products in actual use. Therefore, this paper discusses an experiment investigating the effects of the relationship between product properties and user characteristics by way of a user trial with two products whose usability is known to be problematic. Overall, 84 participants, between the ages of 20 to 74, participated in this study. The experiment was conducted in the USA, South Korea and the Netherlands. In this way we were able to compare this actual use situation with our previous retrospective studies in relation to different cultures. The study concludes that there are differences in soft usability problems between actual use and retrospective evaluation. The kind of soft usability problems experienced is partly dependent on both user characteristics and product properties. The role of users’ expectations as well as their follow-up behaviour in relation to soft usability problems is discussed.

The consumer electronics industry is increasingly being confronted with consumer complaints which cannot be traced back to technical problems. This new class of consumer complaints is defined as ‘no-failure-found’or ‘soft problems’. There are several possible explanations for this phenomenon: product development teams might not be taking these problems seriously, or the current range of products are becoming increasingly complex (product properties) and used by more and more diverse user groups (user characteristics). However, the definite causes of these complaints have not been identified. In order to reveal the interaction between user characteristics, product properties, and soft problems, we

As new electronic products are released annually, there is a growing trend among consumers to seek retro aesthetics. Therefore, it is necessary to explore methods for implementing emotions by incorporating traditional metaphors into new products. This study aims to explore the impact of past metaphorical designs in product form and interaction on user experience. To achieve this, we categorized product form and interaction into traditional and modern elements. Within the context of developing a next-generation food processor, we conducted an experiment using both real products and conceptual designs across four metaphor categories. The results were analyzed using analysis of variance (ANOVA) statistical methods, revealing that traditional metaphors are perceived as geometric, symmetrical, and somewhat impractical, whereas modern metaphors are seen as organic, less symmetrical, comfortable, and practical. Based on these findings, we propose a novel food processor that integrates traditional forms with modern interactions, which is also positively evaluated in terms of user experience. This study highlights the importance of leveraging traditional metaphors in product design and suggests the need for further exploration of their applicability across various product categories .

This paper investigates the effects of experiencing diverse positive emotions in technology use on users’ well-being, referred to as positive emodiversity. We examined technology’s role in facilitating positive emodiversity and well-being through a questionnaire study (N = 116; 580 example cases), in which three sources of emotions were considered: technology as an object, instrument, or enabler. Further, we evaluated how technology-supported hedonic and eudaimonic pursuits are associated with well-being. A regression analysis showed that increased positive emodiversity leads to increased well-being (p<.001). The effect was predicted by the three sources and both hedonic and eudaimonic pursuits. When engaged in positive activities enabled by technology, users experienced more diverse positive emotions, increasing their well-being. The study offers new understandings of the relationships between technologies, emodiversity, and well-being, and provides evidence that designing for a wide diversity of positive emotions, as opposed to generalized pleasure-displeasure distinction, can enrich users’ experiences, enhancing their well-being.

Everyday design (ED) involves the reuse of existing products for new purposes. This behaviour can be easily observed in our everyday lives but has hardly been recognized as a means to stimulate sustainable behavior. Although several in-depth studies in this area has been conducted to understand people’s behavior, they were mainly focused on theory building. Our study, however, is based on the idea that everyday design is one of the tools for professional designers to inspire users to sustainable behavior. Therefore, the study aims to understand how and what product elements and affordances trigger people to perform everyday design. Everyday design normally happens in a natural situation, but because we wanted to have control on the input variables, we did an experiment, in which four basic everyday products were offered to 27 participants with the task to come up with an ED product for each of those four products. A total of 108 ED products were repurposed, followed by interviews. The results indicate that ED products can be reused for various purposes beyond their original functions. The trigger for those ED products were often form-related product elements. The paper shows how these elements are related to affordances. Although affordances of original products are often the trigger for their ED, almost half of the ED products were triggered by hidden affordances. Although it is an explorative study, the conclusion is that the findings may help design practitioners to increase the sustainability of their products through stimulating their reuse.

As the world is increasingly aware of the necessity to contribute to a sustainable future, the concept of eco-design has considerable influence on the attitude of designers. Under such circumstances, this study considers how to extend the life of a product through everyday design (ED): the redesigning by users of their existing everyday products into products with a new or similar function. For the study, 100 female and male participants aged between 20 and 80 years were interviewed with his or her reused ED product. Looking at the user, product, and context as triggers of everyday design, the results show that both context and product characteristics play a dominant role. The study results in an overview of the factors that might trigger everyday design among users, the understanding of which can be integrated into new designs to extend the products' life cycle.

We explore the influence of complexity in packaging design, defined as complexity of action and transformation, upon product appraisal at an unboxing phase of product life cycle. Three packaging designs of different complexity were developed and prototyped. Participant responses were then gathered through ten bipolar semantic differential scales that measured the influence of packaging complexity upon expectation towards and appraisal of the packaged product. Results indicate how increased complexity of action and transformation evoked higher expectations of product quality. Complexity of product packaging was shown to significantly influence the participants' appraisal of the packaged product's personality. Findings contribute to an understanding of how complexity in product packaging implicates the user's affective response to the packaged product through increased expectation resulting in either

Background Although lighting increasingly penetrates our everyday life due to technology advancement, little is known about how people interact with lighting and how contextual factors impact on the experience. Thus, this study attempted to reveal how two contextual factors (the level of concentration required for pleasant lighting use and social interaction) could influence the manipulation of lighting parameters, particularly focusing on the major factors of lighting such as illuminance, color temperature, and hue. Methods To understand of the interaction between contextual factors and lighting variables, an experiment was conducted. 10 singles and 10 couples had to manipulate lighting variables such as intensity and colorin five everyday situations for pleasant lighting experience. Results The result of the experiment showed that illuminance, color temperature and hue are influenced by the degree of concentration, but only partially influenced by social factors. The findings could provide a better understanding of manipulating lighting variables in terms of use context with design practitioners. Conclusions The overall findings of the study indicate that illuminance, color temperature, and hue are significantly dependent upon the level of concentration required in at-home lighting use, and also have only a partial dependence on social effect. This implies that although we assumed that people have their personal lighting preferences, their preferences can be largely dependent on the degree of concentration required for at-home pleasant lighting use. Hence, there are common patterns among people in manipulating lighting parameters, which are less dependent on personal differences. © Archives of Design Research

In recent years, neuroscientific knowledge has been applied to marketing as a novel and efficient means to comprehend the cognitive and behavioral aspects of consumers. A number of studies have attempted to evaluate media contents, especially TV commercials using various neuroimaging techniques such as electroencephalography (EEG). Yet neurophysiological examination of detailed cognitive and affective responses in viewers is still required to provide practical information to marketers. Here, this study develops a method to analyze temporal patterns of EEG data and extract affective and cognitive indices such as happiness, surprise, and attention for TV commercial evaluation.

The Design for Usability project aims at improving the usability of electronic professional and consumer products by creating new methodology and methods for user-centred product development, which are feasible to apply in practice. The project was focused on 5 key areas: (i) design methodology, expanding the existing approach of scenario-based design to incorporate the interaction between product design, user characteristics, and user behaviour; (ii) company processes, barriers and enablers for usability in practice; (iii) user characteristics in relation to types of products and use-situations; (iv) usability decision-making; and (v) product impact on user behaviour. The project team developed methods and techniques in each of these areas to support the design of products with a high level of usability. This paper brings together and summarizes the findings.

The paper reports a study into consumers’ ‘soft’ usability problems they experience using electronic household products. These problems cannot be traced back to a specification violation failure, classified as no failure found (NFF). The aim of this study is to find a relationship between consumers’ soft usability problems and their personal characteristics, encompassing demographical and cognitive aspects. The complaints collected through an exploratory survey were classified into three categories of soft usability problems. The findings indicate that demographic, socioeconomic and cultural characteristics as well as personal traits show significant correlations with these problem categories. Based on the data preliminary user profiles were made. By providing a new definition of usability problems and by user profiling, this study is expected to help design teams to get a better understanding of their target group. The implications of these findings for the product development process are discussed.