Abstract
This case study summarizes the development of a self-administered behavioral inter-vention for positive emotion regulation (PER) that gives users the freedom to choose their own positive behaviors. In contrast to the predominant practice of prescribing pos-itive behaviors (e.g., “keep a gratitude journal”), we explore whether – and how – open-ended instructions could permit users to self-select such behaviors themselves. Employ-ing a research-through-design approach over 4 iterations, our interventions utilize am-biguous prompts (e.g., ‘secret dance’ and ‘bring light’) intended to inspire users to first envision and then perform self-selected positive behaviors during their day-to-day lives. The authors engage in self-reflective exercises and/or collect user feedback with each it-eration to inform purposeful design choices intended to enhance user autonomy, inter-est, and subjective well-being. The case study concludes with a discussion of process-focused lessons for designers along with future research directions for enhancing user autonomy in behavioral interventions for PER.
Keywords
user autonomy, directional ambiguity, design for well-being, positive design
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.682
Citation
Faulk, J., Oluwadairo, O., and Yoon, J. (2022) Secret dance and bring light: Enhancing user autonomy with directional ambiguity in positive emotion regulation interventions, in Lockton, D., Lenzi, S., Hekkert, P., Oak, A., Sádaba, J., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2022: Bilbao, 25 June - 3 July, Bilbao, Spain. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.682
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Research Paper
Included in
Secret dance and bring light: Enhancing user autonomy with directional ambiguity in positive emotion regulation interventions
This case study summarizes the development of a self-administered behavioral inter-vention for positive emotion regulation (PER) that gives users the freedom to choose their own positive behaviors. In contrast to the predominant practice of prescribing pos-itive behaviors (e.g., “keep a gratitude journal”), we explore whether – and how – open-ended instructions could permit users to self-select such behaviors themselves. Employ-ing a research-through-design approach over 4 iterations, our interventions utilize am-biguous prompts (e.g., ‘secret dance’ and ‘bring light’) intended to inspire users to first envision and then perform self-selected positive behaviors during their day-to-day lives. The authors engage in self-reflective exercises and/or collect user feedback with each it-eration to inform purposeful design choices intended to enhance user autonomy, inter-est, and subjective well-being. The case study concludes with a discussion of process-focused lessons for designers along with future research directions for enhancing user autonomy in behavioral interventions for PER.