Joyful Design?Thinking

I believe we can make every product experience joyful, from creation to consumption. Designers can seek a higher purpose in solving a?problem.

We all have a deep desire and a fire within to succeed and be happy. Creation fuels our happiness. On the other hand, our customers have high expectations from the products and services we design and deliver. When customers experience positive feelings on a website or a product, they will take away the same feeling and are more likely to share it.?

We have used popular design thinking methods to solve problems. But, is there anything much deeper, satisfying, soul-fulfilling than the problem to solution process of convergent and divergent thinking we can deploy to improve the happiness quotient for the designer, everyone working to solve the problem, clients, and the end-user?

Joyful design means applying joy to everything.?

Joyful design is about novel approaches to problem-solving, detail-oriented work, consciously trying to be in the company of joyful people, and finding joy within.

Let’s examine some of the challenges.

• There is increasing evidence that technology can create anxiety, social media makes us envious, jealous, miserable, gives FOMO (fear of missing out), traps us in a filter bubble, smartphones disconnect our attention from the present, and reduce our sense of wellbeing. Stress, anxiety, disappointment, eyestrain, sleep disorders, depression, fear, social comparison, bullying, loneliness, and addiction are some of the emotions people experience while using technology products today. When we undergo stress, our body pauses basic functions like digestion and healing to protect us from the situation. Continuous stress causes many physical and mental ailments and affects the quality of the end product design.
• People work very hard in the office only to wait until 5 PM to go back home and live their real life. Such a ‘forced labor’ mentality reduces happiness, health, and innovation.
• Designers have used likes, reviews, testimonials, and gamification to empower users to make them happy. But this is not authentic happiness; Happiness is little about the product or tangibles. Instead, happiness is abstract, is an experience, and is a long, compelling, and authentic story. There is a natural craving for authentic connections and positive experiences with products, people, and everything in our environment.
• Can the design of our favorite website or an application make us happy? As designers, how can we make experiences with technology better?
• Many times we as designers need a way to get unstuck become focused, and be able to realize our true potential. We need processes to lead us from within, find our answers, and radiate the same to the outside world to build high-performance teams and healthier relationships.
• We have seen aggressive marketing, forced messaging on screens and popups, no easy cancellation option, disregard for privacy online, leaving the user feeling helpless and losing interest in the product.
• We cannot obtain happiness through earning a lot of money, drug, or technological invention. Instead, a culture change is needed.
• Happiness is a complex subject, difficult to quantify, and is very subjective.
• Technology should give us a sense of purpose, joy, motivation, inspire happiness, and the connection needed to solve current problems.

Can digital products be designed with trust, transparency, authenticity, a positive mindset, and empowerment — all elements of joy — so that these values are reflected in the end product?

Humans are problem-solving creatures. We crave joy once our basic needs for sustenance are fulfilled. In the right environment, with focussed effort and a process that leads to joy, possible.

Joy is real-life experiences.

Joy is beginning a morning with a smile, walking on the street hearing your own footsteps, sipping coffee with the newspaper folded under your arm, sitting silently on a noisy commuter train, learning to lose yourself in silence, sharing a smile with a stranger in a store, looking at someone in a crowded room and knowing they are yours, stretching your arms to meet someone special, coming homewards after a long journey, eating a box of cookies during delicious emergencies, smelling the wet earth after the first rain of the season, smelling the lover’s neck, sleeping better at night, listening to the heart, enjoying a simple and ordinary bagel sexed up with cream cheese, looking at old black and white or sepia family photographs, remembering good times, sad times, youth, the first kiss that felt like the shortest distance to the moon, the warmth of holding hands of the loved one at your sunset of life and remembering the journey of life. Joy is being crazy, reckless, silly, feeling beautiful, being kind, learning something new, or simply enjoying a sip of Pepsi after a heated debate with colleagues. How can these experiences be put into every product or service we create?

Create products that follow familiar experiences. Every little detail matters. Users get attached to products they are familiar with.

Joy improves real-life experiences.

Whether it is at work or home, relationships are a source of joy or a source of stress and mental pain. By focussing on building positive relationships, we can bring more joy to everyday personal and team tasks. Time is flying fast, and life throws many challenges every day. Being able to focus and keeping calm allows us to be better problem solvers and innovators. We are not aiming to change people; we are only changing ourselves, how we think and act. Joyful thinking and doing (discovery and creation) leads to the realization of inner happiness that spreads into everything we do and interact with.

Why should designers care about?joy?

• Joy is the building block for a fulfilling life; it makes products great, business and personal relationships succeed.
• Joy is not a gadget or a screen. Instead, joy comes from real-life experiences that can be represented on screen or used to make creation, selling, and consumption more authentic and lifelike.
• Joy is everywhere, effortless but interconnected, and can be obtained through creating simple, authentic interactions in products that make connections either with the inner self or with others.
• As designers, we love to talk about delightful experiences for the users, but that is a small part of the solution. It is mostly limited to providing small pleasures in digital experiences. Joy is a lot more than the visceral, behavioral, and reflective experience in ‘emotional design’ that Don Norman talks about. It is not just the outcome, but the entire design process and the state of mind of everyone involved, from the designer, engineer, and other team members, client, and the end-user.
• The joyful design creates external environments that nurture inner joy and create inner environments of joy that spread the fragrance of joy to the outside world.
• Joy is simply the filling between 2 tasks, time periods, thoughts, people, or experiences that make everything matter and Interesting.
• People remember unhappiness more than happy experiences. But, unfortunately, joy has a short memory and fades over time. Thus as designers, we ought to be working harder to create solutions that are a little extra than what the user expected, effortless, personalized, clever, and better than everything out there in a competitive market.
• Joy is not a life event; it is a habit. It takes regular effort to be joyful. Joyfulness is a mix of how satisfied we are with our life, work, and purpose; and how good we feel every day. We have the ability to control how we feel, and through constant effort, we have the potential to create a more fulfilling life or product.

My framework for Joyful Design?Thinking

The joyful design process combines design thinking, positive psychology, mindfulness, and cognitive behavioral therapy to improve innovation and happiness quotient in people and?designs.

I came up with this process and over the years I have used, improved, and implemented this process with my clients, colleagues, family, friends, myself, and also tested with end-users. While design skills and tools have helped me create designs according to the product design brief, applying this framework helped me add a little ‘extra’ to the ordinary and make it extraordinary.

Joyful design is scientific.

Even though the joyful experience is very subjective, we can measure its results. Today psychologists want to learn how people feel, and economists want to learn how people value something more than the other. Anthropologists want to understand how culture impacts happiness and vice versa. Neuroscientists want to understand how the brain changes when triggered with joy. Finally, experience designers want to understand all of the above and transfer it through design to the end-user.

Conventional Design Thinking has its?limits.

• ‘Design Thinking’ has fallen short in its ability to create new services, businesses, and a culture of innovation. Understanding of business model is essential when designing a product. We need both a top-down and bottom-up approach and think holistically since all parts and interconnected. One cannot design a product for desirability and then put a business case around it.?
• Design thinking misses a strong framework around emotional design. Instead, it is a more simplified problem-solution framework and does not factor in people's state of mind using it.?
• Lack of a holistic approach sometimes creates superficial solutions that may make solutions look modern, progressive, and less controversial due to the democratization of the design process.
• The success of a design process is not just able to come up with a solution through the process but also depends on emotional and behavioral aspects like motivation, achievement, power structures, engagement, and focus of the design team.
• When design thinking is used as a linear, closed, and templated process, it only delivers incremental change and innovation. Instead, the design process at its core needs to be a lifestyle linked to a core human aspiration to thrive.
• It is difficult to produce cultural and organizational change through Design Thinking. It has sometimes lost its relevance when it becomes a corporate requirement to check off.

Take your work seriously, but joy can help lead to better?results.

• Everyone loves the small joys in life. Small joys in life make a big difference. Whoever you are, if you are given a small moment of joy, you appreciate it, you reciprocate it, and you feel nice about it. The joy a person derives from achieving a goal is just as important as their ability to achieve that goal. Research has suggested that positive affect can influence how cognitive material is organized and thus may influence creativity.
• During user, journeys anticipate all anxiety, panic, drop-off, and bad experience scenarios and apply ideas to convert them to normal outcomes. Even normal outcomes that are unexpected during a bad user experience create joy in the user.
• Be rich from inside with joy. It will motivate you. Feeling hopeful, having higher aspirations and goals, and having a meaning in life improves joy in life.
• Human beings are social creatures, and we find joy when we are together. Therefore, if office culture becomes friendly, happiness and productivity will increase.
• Joyful leadership: A leader embraces others as an equal. A leader knows that their actions can influence the world. A leader feels happy with other people’s happiness and thus is always joyful.

• Our environment, people we work with, and clients all have a certain vibe that influences our inner joy. Improve the vibe. Creating joyful workplaces and teams can increase productivity by 15 percent.
• Order, context, and organizing principles tend to suck the fun out of things sometimes. Add some quick novelty & unexpected delight to products. These fringe and ‘unnecessary’ ideas create emotions and engagement.
• Infuse humanity in technology-driven products to create a positive reaction from users. Users react with moments of happiness when products seem to react, care, and recognize a bit like other humans or extensions of our own brains.
• Sweat the details. Each small detail adds to a larger moment of joy. When users feel smart, creative, connected, and cared for, they are express positive emotions by taking positive intended actions like making a purchase, downloading an app, consuming the message, become returning users.
• Our thoughts become our reality. Look at the past with gratitude. Move past trauma and any unhappy experiences. Have pride in what you have overcome. Grow self-confidence and patience. Confidence is the result of not just doing something well but knowing you do something well. Focus on what you have and not what do you don’t have. Operate from abundance. Operate from a base of love.
• Happy people create happy products. These five simple things help you find joy in everything you do. 1- Free your heart from discord. 2- Free your mind from worries. 3- Live simply. 4- Give more. 5- Take less.
• If the mind is enjoying something, become conscious and prolong it to intensify the emotions. For example, while working on a design, or being with the team, if the experience has joy, enjoy them, prolong them and make this prolonging a habit. Savoring the past, present, or future helps find higher meaning and purpose in any activity.
• Design is giving. The giver gains more benefit and gains better health, happiness, connection, and open-mindedness. When designers see their design as giving their best to the end-user to make their lives better, it brings happiness to the designer.
• Design is empathy. When we empathize with the users, we become less judgmental, less frustrated, and disappointed. As a result, our patience is improved, and we can build better solutions.
• As a designer, your state of mind is reflected in what you create. So keep stress out of mind. Try to give the best experience and value to the user more than what you expect from the user in return.

References and further?reading

• 9 subtle ways technology is making humanity worse. https://www.businessinsider.com/technology-negative-bad-effects-society-2019-8
• Filter bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_b
• Does technology affect happiness? https://ed.stanford.edu/in-the-media/does-technology-affect-happiness
• Heavy Technology Use Linked to Fatigue, Stress, and Depression in Young Adults. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/technology-depression_b_1723625
• Study links mobile device addiction to depression and anxiety. https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/334240
• If Facebook Use Causes Envy, Depression Could Follow. https://munewsarchives.missouri.edu/news-releases/2015/0203-if-facebook-use-causes-envy-depression-could-follow
• Digital Health Practices, Social Media Use, and Mental Well-Being Among Teens and Young Adults in the U.S. https://hopelab.org/reports/pdf/a-national-survey-by-hopelab-and-well-being-trust-2018.pdf
• The changing face of bullying: An empirical comparison between traditional and internet bullying and victimization. https://www.cybersmile.org/wp-content/uploads/Law-Shapka-et-al-f2f-vs-online-bullying-CHB.pdf
• The Epidemic of Loneliness. https://www.aspenideas.org/sessions/the-epidemic-of-loneliness?gclid=Cj0KCQjwuZDtBRDvARIsAPXFx3AkMch0Zf8dwQpwHX_pbtiMeLQ2Smbrtkmq6ECNeAiL5prHRsAY9RwaAgeVEALw_wcB
• Rethink happiness: Some insights on life, love, and money. https://himanshugb.medium.com/rethink-happiness-some-insights-on-life-love-and-money-51a515917f37
• What Happiness Looks Like On Instagram. https://nation.time.com/2013/07/10/what-happiness-looks-like-on-instagram/photo/chocolate-sprinkle-ice-cream-has-just-made-my-day/
• Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XCCSHDQ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
• Life Goals Matter to Happiness: A Revision of Set-Point Theory. https://ideas.repec.org/p/diw/diwwpp/dp639.html
• Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience. https://www.amazon.com/Savoring-New-Model-Positive-Experience/dp/0805851208
• The Future of Happiness: How to Be Happy in the Digital Age. https://www.skipprichard.com/the-future-of-happiness-how-to-be-happy-in-the-digital-age/
• What is Design Thinking? https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/design-thinking
• Design Thinking. https://www.ideou.com/pages/design-thinking

Himanshu Bharadwaj is an innovation and experience design leader in New York. You can view his work at joyful.design. Himanshu’s mailbox is always open if you would like to work together or have something interesting to say.