Designing Moments of Meaning and Pleasure. Experience Design and Happiness

Marc Hassenzahl, Kai Eckoldt, Sarah Diefenbach, Matthias Laschke, Eva Lenz, Joonhwan Kim

While society changes its focus from “well-fare” to “well-being,” design becomes increasingly interested in the question whether it can design for happiness. In the present paper, we outline Experience Design, an approach which places pleasurable and meaningful moments at the center of all design efforts. We discuss reasons for focusing on experiences, and provide conceptual tools to help designers, such as a model of an artifact as explicitly consisting of both the material and the experiential. We suggest psychological needs as a way to understand and categorize experiences, and “experience patterns” as a tool to distill the “essence” of an experience for inscribing it into artifacts. Finally, we briefly reflect upon the morality implied by such experiential artifacts.