Evoking meaningful experiences at work – a positive design framework for work tools

Abstract

Experience design takes experiential aspects as the starting point of design. This approach is hardly ever utilised in the work context, although positive and meaningful experiences in the workplace are known to be important. Thus, we are interested in the profound experiences that address the meaning of work in the long run, since the perception of one's work as meaningful has been shown to elicit various positive effects both for the employees and the employers. This research article therefore investigates how to define meaningful experience goals for work tool design. The research examined 31 experience goals collected from 10 tool design cases through the lens of 2 theories: the mechanisms of meaningful work (MMW) and the positive design framework (PDF). From this, we have identified that the MMW can substantiate the PDF and extend its application into work-related contexts. Complemented by these mechanisms, a PDF for work tools has been proposed to help experience designers in the challenging task of experience goal definition in the early phase of experience design.

Keywords:

• positive design
• meaningful experiences
• experience goal
• work tool
• mechanisms of meaningful work

Acknowledgements

We thank the students for working on the experience design cases, as well as the companies for the assignments and help.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Tekes-funded FIMECC UXUS research programme.