This thesis presents new theories and creative techniques for exploring ‘designing for home happiness'. Set in the context of a primarily unsustainable and unhappy world, home is understood as a facilitator of current lifestyle practices that could also support long-term happiness activities, shown to promote more sustainable behaviour. It has yet to be examined extensively from a happiness perspective and many homes lack opportunities for meaningful endeavours. Service Design, an approach that supports positive interactions, shows potential in facilitating ‘designing for home happiness' but its tools are generally employed for visualising new systems/services or issues within existing ones instead of exploring related subjectivity. Art therapy techniques, historically used for expressing felt experiences, present applicable methods for investigating such subjective moments and shaping design opportunities for home happiness but have yet to be trialled in a design research context. This thesis therefore explores how Art Therapy and Service Design can be used successfully for ‘designing for home happiness'. A first study proposes photo elicitation as a creative method to explore, with participants from UK family households, several significant home happiness needs. Subsequently, art therapy techniques are proposed in Study 2 through two bespoke Happy-Home Workshops. This gives way to the Home Happiness Theory and Designing for Home Happiness Theory, which enable designers to design for home happiness. The Designing for Home Happiness Framework emerges from these studies proposing a new design creative method delivered through a workshop with specialised design tools and accompanying process for creating home happiness designs (i.e. services, product-service-systems). Through two Main Studies the framework is tested and validated with design experts in two different contexts, Loughborough (UK) and Limerick (Ireland), confirming its suitability and transferability in ‘designing for home happiness'. Resulting concepts support collective home happiness and social innovations by facilitating appropriate social contexts for their development. Overall, this research is the first to combine art therapy techniques with service design methods, offering original theories and approaches for ‘designing for home happiness' within Service Design and for social innovation. Collectively, this research delivers new creative methods for service designers, social innovators and designers more generally to investigate and support happier experiences within and outside the home for a more sustainable future.

Designing with and for People with Dementia: Wellbeing, Empowerment and Happiness is the International Conference 2019 of the MinD Consortium, the DRS Special Interest Group on Behaviour Change and the DRS Special Interest Group on Wellbeing and Happiness, hosted by the Technische Universität Dresden, in Dresden, Germany. The conference proceedings provide trans-disciplinary contributions for researchers, practitioners, end-users and policy makers from the design and health care professions in terms of new findings, approaches and methods for using design to improve dementia care and to support people with dementia and their carers. The conference has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 691001, and from the DFG German Research Foundation.

[pt] Na última década, os smartphones e aplicativos móveis tem se tornado parte da vida de bilhões ao redor do mundo. Designers são, implícita ou explicitamente, responsáveis pelas experiências emocionais que os produtos que utilizamos canalizam, bem como por seu impacto no bem-estar dos indivíduos. Uma vez que aplicativos de rede social e mensagem são produtos com diversas particularidades, com um público heterogêneo e massivo, e que experiências emocionais em produtos são fenômenos complexos e personalizados, a presente dissertação propõe analisar a diversidade de experiências emocionais e de relação com o bem-estar associadas à interação com aplicativos de rede social, com enfoque no Instagram e no Facebook. Foi realizada uma combinação dos métodos de Questionário e Colagem para buscar responder de forma descritiva as perguntas, analisando comportamentos, emoções e relação com necessidades psicológicas. Os principais resultados apontam para uma coleção de sentimentos e comportamentos que se repetem nessa experiência emocional, relacionada ao estímulo de necessidades psicológicas vitais para o bem-estar. O principal resultado é uma combinação de recomendações para o projeto de aplicativos sociais, que buscam apresentar formas de canalizar experiências saudáveis e positivas por meio da interação entre indivíduo e rede social. / [en] In the last decade, social apps have become part of the lives of billions around the world. Designers are, implicitly or explicitly, responsible for the emotional experiences and well-being impact that products convey. Social apps are products with several particularities, with a heterogeneous and massive audience. Considering the complexity of emotional experiences in products, the present work analyzes the diversity of emotional experiences and relationships with well-being associated with use and interaction with social apps, focusing on Instagram and Facebook. We combined the Questionnaire and Collage methods to analyze behavioral patterns, emotions, and relationships with psychological needs. Results describe a collection of feelings and behaviors that repeat throughout emotional experiences, related to stimulation of psychological needs that are vital for well-being. Our main result is a combination of recommendations for the design of social applications, intending to convey healthy and positive experiences.