Can We Design for Well-Being?

Because engineering design is aimed at the creation of useful products, it is always in some sense aimed at creating value for users. In the last two decades, designers have started to pay more systematic and theoretical attention to customer satisfaction or user value (e.g., Akao 1990 Woodruff and Gardial 1999 Holbrook 1999). Still, what exactly constitutes user value, and how design can contribute to this is not yet well-understood (Boztepe 2007). Moreover, the notion of well-being, on which I will be focusing, is usually not discussed in this literature.