Design for Happiness Deck
The Design for Happiness Deck is a tool that you can use to tap into the vast potential of lasting well-being. Use it to break down the seemingly overwhelming phenomenon of happiness into manageable components that offer you a direct doorway to ideation and analyses of your design project. We believe that explicitly focusing on customer happiness is an indispensable part of user-centered design and, ultimately, a reliable predictor of a design’s success.
Based on the Positive Design framework developed by Pieter Desmet and Anna Pohlmeyer (2013, 2017; see below for references), these three card sets explore three essential aspects of designing for happiness:
- Pleasure – happiness that comes from enjoying the moment
- Personal Significance – happiness derived from having a sense of progressing towards a future goal and from the awareness of past achievements
- Virtue – happiness that is the result of morally valued behaviour
For each aspect, a fine-grained overview of 24 potential manifestations is provided – 24 shades of pleasure, 24 human goals and 24 virtuous character strengths, combining to a total set of 72 cards.
Usage Tips
Interview
with Pieter Desmet
Resources
The Design for Happiness Deck is published under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This means that you are free to share the card set for non-commercial purposes as long as you give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and do not modify the original material. We believe in open-access research, so you can download the card set here: Downloadable PDF. And the manual here:
Authors
The Design for Happiness Deck was created by researchers and alumni of the Delft Institute of Positive Design.
- Concept and content: Anna Pohlmeyer, Jay Yoon and Pieter Desmet.
- Card deck design and image production: Christiaan Kieft and Simon Jimenez.
Citation
- In communication, please refer to this publication as follows: Delft Institute of Positive Design (2017). Design for Happiness Deck. Delft, Delft University of Technology. ISBN: 978-94-92516-86-2
The card deck was based on the Positive Design Framework:
- Desmet, P.M.A., & Pohlmeyer, A.E. (2013). Positive design: An introduction to design for subjective well-being. International Journal of Design, 7(3), 5-19.
- Pohlmeyer, A.E. & Desmet, P.M.A. (2017). From good to the greater good. In J. Chapman (Ed.) The Routledge handbook of sustainable product design (pp. 469-486). London: Routledge.
- The typologies used in the card set have been drawn from the work of Jay Yoon, Pieter Desmet, and Anna Pohlmeyer (positive emotions), Martin Ford and Charles Nichols (human goals), Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman (character strengths). Full references can be found in the card deck colophon.
Publication date
November 2018
Design for Happiness Deck
The Design for Happiness Deck is a tool that you can use to tap into the vast potential of lasting well-being. Use it to break down the seemingly overwhelming phenomenon of happiness into manageable components that offer you a direct doorway to ideation and analyses of your design project. We believe that explicitly focusing on customer happiness is an indispensable part of user-centered design and, ultimately, a reliable predictor of a design’s success.
Based on the Positive Design framework developed by Pieter Desmet and Anna Pohlmeyer (2013, 2017; see below for references), these three card sets explore three essential aspects of designing for happiness:
- Pleasure – happiness that comes from enjoying the moment
- Personal Significance – happiness derived from having a sense of progressing towards a future goal and from the awareness of past achievements
- Virtue – happiness that is the result of morally valued behaviour
For each aspect, a fine-grained overview of 24 potential manifestations is provided – 24 shades of pleasure, 24 human goals and 24 virtuous character strengths, combining to a total set of 72 cards.
Usage Tips
Interview
with Pieter Desmet
Resources
The Design for Happiness Deck is published under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This means that you are free to share the card set for non-commercial purposes as long as you give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and do not modify the original material. We believe in open-access research, so you can download the card set here: Downloadable PDF. And the manual here:
Authors
The Design for Happiness Deck was created by researchers and alumni of the Delft Institute of Positive Design.
- Concept and content: Anna Pohlmeyer, Jay Yoon and Pieter Desmet.
- Card deck design and image production: Christiaan Kieft and Simon Jimenez.
Citation
- In communication, please refer to this publication as follows: Delft Institute of Positive Design (2017). Design for Happiness Deck. Delft, Delft University of Technology. ISBN: 978-94-92516-86-2
The card deck was based on the Positive Design Framework:
- Desmet, P.M.A., & Pohlmeyer, A.E. (2013). Positive design: An introduction to design for subjective well-being. International Journal of Design, 7(3), 5-19.
- Pohlmeyer, A.E. & Desmet, P.M.A. (2017). From good to the greater good. In J. Chapman (Ed.) The Routledge handbook of sustainable product design (pp. 469-486). London: Routledge.
- The typologies used in the card set have been drawn from the work of Jay Yoon, Pieter Desmet, and Anna Pohlmeyer (positive emotions), Martin Ford and Charles Nichols (human goals), Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman (character strengths). Full references can be found in the card deck colophon.
Publication date
November 2018