Design for Well-Being

How can we build technologies that make people happy?

A drawing of a man preparing coffee with a Bialetti coffee maker. The picture represents the psychological need of security, which relates to positive daily routines such as coffee making in the morning.

Technological innovation is not a deterministic process towards a fixed future. It is always driven by individual interests and priorities. During the development process, relevant stakeholders highlight certain features they consider important, and they discard others. In a way, the user-centered design paradigm is based on this insight: Users are now considered relevant stakeholders, and that has changed design processes and technologies across industries.

Accordingly, new laptops, smartphones, or coffee machines do not simply create better and happier lives for people, just like that. “Happiness” or “well-being” need to be prioritized in the design process, and influence how the technologies develop. Design for well-being is an approach that focuses exactly on that: It is about designing technologies with the explicit goal to promote subjective well-being. Well-being does not “just happen” if we fix usability issues and create functional systems to solve a technical task. We need to consider it as a “function” on its own that we can design into things. This is the central research topic of my PhD advisor Marc Hassenzahl and my former research group. I have adopted this perspective as an integral part of my own research and contributed with some of my own work.

One of my application areas are individual time perspectives: How positively or negatively people view their personal past, presence, and future, independent of “objective” circumstances (such as the number and intensity of illnesses, parties, and relationships). The subjective view of one’s past in particular is strongly associated with subjective well-being. Therefore, I have studied how people interact with different types of reminiscence technologies. Specifically, I have studied how people with different time perspective profiles look back at different types of positive memories using different media. Our findings indicate that especially people who usually tend to think more negatively about their past can profit from digital reminiscence tools, and that the way the memories are represented by these tools plays a crucial role.

Another project was a collaboration with Holger Klapperich on home automation. Holger argues that automation research is typically rooted in industry settings, where economic efficiency is the central concern. But priorities are different in the home: Here, people spend their free time, they do not need to be efficient with everything they do, and they may prefer less efficient but more fun designs. He designed a semi-automated coffee grinder optimized for a pleasurable interaction, instead of efficiency, and I collaborated with him for the statistical analysis of his research.

A young man using a semi-automated coffee grinder specifically designed to support psychological needs for competence, stimulation, and autonomy.

My other research project on nurse-centered shift planning is also based on the design for well-being approach. We designed a shift planning process that puts nurses’ needs and subjective well-being first, and designed other features such as efficiency around that. My current work on user experiences in social situations more specifically asks questions that arise when different people come together: Whose well-being should we design for? What can we do if one person enjoys their phone call but disturbs others nearby? How can we extend the current, somewhat narrow focus on the user only, to include a broader group of people? I am working on case studies and new design processes to find good solutions for these problems.

Further Reading

Beyond Hiding and Revealing: Exploring Effects of Visibility and Form of Interaction on the Witness Experience

Alarith Uhde, Tim zum Hoff & Marc Hassenzahl
2023, Proceedings of the ACM on Human Computer Interaction (MobileHCI)

A Nurse-Centered Approach to Computer-Supported Healthcare Shift Planning

Alarith Uhde
2023, University of Siegen (PhD Thesis)

Obtrusive Subtleness and Why We Should Focus on Meaning, not Form, in Social Acceptability Studies

Alarith Uhde, Tim zum Hoff & Marc Hassenzahl
2022, Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM'22)

Design and Appropriation of Computer-Supported Self-Scheduling Practices in Healthcare Shift Work

Alarith Uhde, Matthias Laschke & Marc Hassenzahl
2021, Proceedings of the ACM on Human Computer Interaction (CSCW)

Time Perspectives in Technology-mediated Reminiscing: Effects of Basic Design Decisions on Subjective Well-being

Alarith Uhde & Marc Hassenzahl
2021, Human-Computer Interaction

Designing Everyday Automation with Wellbeing in Mind

Holger Klapperich, Alarith Uhde & Marc Hassenzahl
2020, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing

Fairness and Decision-making in Collaborative Shift Scheduling Systems

Alarith Uhde, Nadine Schlicker, Dieter Wallach & Marc Hassenzahl
2020, Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Positive Work Practices. Opportunities and Challenges in Designing Meaningful Work-related Technology

Matthias Laschke, Alarith Uhde & Marc Hassenzahl
2020, Contribution to the CHI Workshop on Worker-Centered Design

Understanding and Designing Automation with Peoples' Wellbeing in Mind

Holger Klapperich, Alarith Uhde & Marc Hassenzahl
2019, Contribution to the CHI Workshop on Everyday Automation Experience
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