Designing Happiness

The most important thing is to enjoy your life – to be happy – it’s all that matters

Audrey Hepburn.

Happiness is a mental state that is characterised by positive emotions. However, as designers, how can we experience happiness working within a technical landscape that is constantly evolving?

What we identify as ‘happiness’ is set against our personal outlook, which changes over the course of time. And once we achieve happiness in one area of life we strive for it elsewhere, turning it into a new personal pursuit.

To achieve happiness it is said your mind-set should be; ‘if you can’t change it, change your outlook’. However, while others ‘change their outlook’ we as designers are forced to consider all possibilities and ask ‘how can we change it?’. ‘How can we innovate around our experiences to find a ‘faster, better, stronger’ solution that ultimately makes us – the designer – and them – our user – happier?’.

From a UX Design perspective such change could involve introducing a refined interaction with innovative technology or discovering new product solutions to be implemented into a service experience.

As our cultural and technological landscape changes over time so too does our expectation of happiness. Having said that, what is then deemed to be good design has to adapt to the revised constraints of the new environment and new user expectations. The 10 principles of Good Design set by Dieter Rams complements this,

Good design is Innovative – The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.

Dieter Rams

As designers we can be stuck in a constant pursuit of perfection which can never be ‘done’. Our curiosity for innovation and pursuit of happiness fuels our design process.  It is that which gives us the inclination to improve, iterate and, ultimately, to change our engagement and interaction with the world.

However with constant ‘unfinished business’, can designers ever be truly happy?

As Dieter Rams states, an aspect of good design is to be ‘innovative’. However, good design is also about achieving ‘healthy tension’ – finding an approach that includes all relevant parties (user needs, business objectives, technical constraints).

Happiness for a designer should be in finding a compromise that recognises these potentially conflicting demands to create a successful product or service that is usable, useful and compelling.

Like great ideas, great design solutions evolve over time. Regardless of what is deemed a ground-breaking design solution, there are no genuine ‘revolutions’ in design as ultimately it is an iterative process that has to change with our environment.

Happiness for a designer should be found not only in a successful end product that makes its users happy but in the product’s wider contribution to the evolution of design thinking.

‘If you can’t change it, change your outlook’. For designers this should be a willingness to avoid self-indulgence in our work, focusing more on the ongoing process and less on the perpetually ‘unfinished’ outcome.