Deger Ozkaramanli

Long-Term Goals or Immediate Desires? Introducing a Toolset for Designing with Self-Control Dilemmas

Abstract This paper suggests that designers can frame user behaviour in terms of the conflicts between long-term goals and immediate desires (i.e. self-control dilemmas), and address these conflicts by facilitating the pursuit of long-term goals. A phenomenological study provided an understanding of self-control dilemmas and the strategies people use to deal with these dilemmas. Based on this understanding, this paper proposes a framework for analysing self-control dilemmas and three supporting design strategies. The framework can act as an analysis tool when distinguishing between long-term goals and immediate desires, and the design strategies can facilitate generation of ideas that can address self-control dilemmas. Understanding these human principles offers novel opportunities for products, services, or policies that contribute to subjective well-being.

Emotion-Driven Product Design

Abstract This chapter introduces six insights from emotion knowledge that support a structured approach to emotion-driven design activities. In design processes, these insights can be used to structure consumer insights, to stimulate creativity, and to support communication within the design team, with clients and with consumers. The first three insights broaden the emotion repertoire by detailing how diverse, mixed, nuanced, and even negative emotions can enrich consumer experiences. The other three insights focus on the causes of consumer emotions. The fourth insight explains how emotion measurement can help understanding what people really care for. The fifth insight focuses on consumer dilemmas, indicating how these can be used to design emotionally relevant products and services. The sixth and final insight shows how opportunities for emotion-driven design can be increased with design that addresses emotions that are experienced in the context of consuming products and services.

From teatime cookies to rain-pants: resolving dilemmas through design using concerns at three abstraction levels

Abstract Users often have conflicting concerns (i.e., dilemmas), such as ‘embracing change vs. following tradition.’ Design can resolve these dilemmas through simultaneously fulfilling conflicting user concerns. This paper proposes three abstraction levels for framing user concerns when formulating dilemmas. In a large-scale industry project, we identified that dilemmas can be formulated and resolved at different abstraction levels. Based on these preliminary findings, we developed a structured way to formulate dilemmas, which involves using three different types of concerns (i.e., product-, activity-, and identity-focused concerns). In this framework, product-focused concerns represent the most concrete concern level and identity-focused concerns represent the most abstract level. Sixty master-level design students were asked to formulate a dilemma evoked by a product of their own choice and to create design ideas to resolve this dilemma. The results showed that dilemmas involving all concern levels can be an input for ideation, with the ‘most abstract yet informative’ dilemma being the most inspiring. In addition, we found that design can resolve dilemmas in several distinct ways, where each dilemma-resolving strategy comes with opportunities and challenges. Consciously formulating and examining alternative dilemma formulations can create opportunities that might otherwise not be considered as input for ideation.