Designing for Meaningfulness in Life

Essential elements of meaningfulness in life and how to design product meaning for it

Meaningfulness design approach in brief

‘Meaning’ is what we pursue in our lives as humanity. ‘Design’ is making sense (of things) once going back to its epistemology Latin de + signare. This article is a research-based writing which addresses the intersection between meaning and design, specifically how to design meaning of products and services for enhancing psychological meaningfulness in end-users’ lives.

This article presents two major findings.

1. Meaningfulness design is not design thinking or design-driven innovation. It is a combination of a human-centered approach emphasizing on deep understanding of human needs (outside-in) and a vision-driven approach creatively envisioning an ideal meaningful experience in future (inside-out). Behavioral design is a possible approach to induce end-users into the envisioned meaningful experience.
2. Meaningfulness in life from positive psychology has six core elements; purposefulness, value, significance, engagement, connectivity and narrativity. These elements can be utilized in conceptualizing a new meaning which probably enhance psychological meaningfulness in life.

WHY — Meaningfulness design?

Meaning helps us explain the world and ourselves, learn, and make sense of what is around us. Meaningfulness in life seems to be a major component of human well-being and a major source of motivation for action. However, ‘meaning’ becomes blur in today’s world of the ever-increasing diversity of values and options in life.

The radical change of society and technology make it easy for us to lose the meaning of lives and people themselves don’t know what is meaningful for their lives — Barry Schwartz, Paradox of choice

The point is that more options available, more easily people lose meaning in lives. Even worse, the radical change in society and technology constantly changes our life context, which hinder us from settling down to the meaning. The situation suggests ‘meaning’ becomes much more relevant nowadays, hence, meaning should be central focus of designing products and services for meaningfulness in end-users’ lives.

Psychological basis for meaningfulness

Meaningfulness in life is considered as a slippery private concept, depending on personality, value and context of lives. Still, as a conceptual underpinning on this subject, I synthesized the essential elements of meaningfulness by reviewing a wealth resource of psychological literatures.

Synthesis of psychological meaningfulness

1. Purposefulness — Sense of core goals, aims and direction in life.
2. Value — Sense of goodness, positivity and justify certain courses of action.
3. Significance — Sense of life’s inherent value and having a life worth living.
4. Engagement—Full commitment in things, relationships and activities.
5. Connectivity — Bonds of love with others, something bigger than self.
6. Narrativity — Sense of comprehensibility and making sense of one’s life.

Meaningfulness design approach

To explore how to create meaning in products and services for end-users’ meaningfulness, I conducted interviews with six design experts in Finland. The data analyses were consistently structured by using the qualitative data analysis software (Atlas).

Example of analyzing data

The qualitative data analyses suggested the following meaningfulness design guideline constituted of four design stages.

Guideline of meaningfulness design

a. Exploration of meaningfulness

Firstly, meaningfulness design starts from two research activities. One is to understand an end-user’s meaningfulness in the existing life context, i.e. user needs, value and lifestyle. The second is to sense weak signals in general, which affect the life contextual change in future, i.e. social trends, technological change, people’s interaction habits.

b. Conceptualization of meaning

The second phase aims at hypothesizing an innovative meaningful experience in future. This phase combines both 1) analytical understanding about possible continuation in future (scenario) based on the collected weak signals in the previous phase, and 2) the designer’s vision in future which deepens and exposes one’s internal vision about ideal state in the future. Meaningfulness design could make use of psychological meaningfulness when clearing the designer’s internal vision in future.

c. Concept development of product and service

The third phase intends to develop the product or service concept based on the designed new meaning. The key is to focus upon an end-user’s behavioral change. The innovative new meaning in products or services consequently induces an end-user’s behavior into an envisioned meaningful experience. To achieve the intended behavioral change, the behavioral science insights could be utilized, designing the short-term motivation to intervene the end-users’ behavior in the beginning. This behavioral design approach needs to be carefully used not to provide only awful urgency for an end-user to use, but designer needs to balance with providing true meaningfulness to end-users in the long-run. In essence, the results suggests that meaningfulness design needs to shift the focus from the existing user experience practice focusing on short-term experience such as emotional design to long-term experience such as change in the user’s attitude or habit.

d. Evaluation of meaningfulness for end-users

Lastly, the conceptualized new meaning needs to be tested comparing with what end-users feel. It requires the iteration of trying out product or service concepts to ensure the positive impact on meaningfulness in end-users’ lives. The intended meaningfulness can be ensured by the comparison in the user’s behavioral change when using the designed products or services.

The above is a proposal of meaningfulness design approach. It would be nice if you could be interested in any part of it.

# This article is based on the masters research I conducted in International Design Business Management (IDBM), School of Science, Aalto University.