Chenchen Shen
Experience & Interaction Design
GIFT FOR HAPPINESS
Research & Design for Positive Emotion & Subjective Well-being
Research intern at Delft Institute of Positive Design | Dec. 2012 - May 2014
What kind of gifts can make people happy?
How can design facilitate people to come up with gifts that make the recipient happy?
This project, which was collaborated with another design student, investigates people’s gift-receiving experience, addressing the ingredients of gifts that make people happy.
Theory Development
A questionnaire was sent to 109 students in TU Delft. They were asked to think of one gift that they received last year that made them very happy, and explain what it was and why it made them happy. A card set was made to present the results in a friendly way for communication. A workshop was conducted to study the gift stories in depth. The key points were extracted and classified into several interrelated categories.
Key results
Tool Development
Based on the theory, new approaches of generating gift ideas could be created, which were translated into a tool to facilitate gift selection and ideation.
Workshop was chosen as the initial form of the tool to facilitate people to come up with gift ideas, as it provides good opportunities for researchers to observe, engage and communicate with participants. It focuses on trying out new methods and approaches, which is the core of the tool design.
Brainstorming sheets-1
Brainstorming sheets-2
Mini stories to explain the Bronze Gift
Brainstorming sheets-1
According to the results, the design played an effective role in helping people generate gift ideas, which creates happiness of the recipients. It guides people through the thinking process by steps. The results lead to some suggestions for the next step of design.
In the future, I will design a more user-friendly tool, probably an application, based on the proposed theory and the initial tool development.
If you are interested, please check the report of the project here.