Hassenzahl, M., Eckoldt, K., Diefenbach, S., Laschke, M., Lenz, E., & Kim, J. (2013). Designing Moments of Meaning and Pleasure. Experience Design and Happiness. International Journal of Design, 7(3), 21–31.
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 the 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 an artifact. Finally, we briefly reflect upon the morality implied by such experiential artifacts.
