Design for Well-Being: An Approach for Understanding Users' Lives in Design for Development

Many of the Design for Development outcomes which are unsuited to the users and their environment are based on poorly defined needs and preferences. Product designers are trained to take the user perspective into account, but they are not specifically trained to conduct ethnographic research. Thereby, they have limited time and resources to...

Using the capability approach to detect design opportunities

When developing products and services to improve the well-being of the multidimensional poor, designers need deep contextual insight. However, literature does not specify which topics to discuss or which questions to ask. We used Sen’s capability approach to develop question categories and specific questions, and we selected tools to support...

Approaching design for development from a capability perspective

To improve the well-being of disadvantaged and marginalized populations by product design, deep contextual insight is required. However, literature does not specify which topics to discuss or which questions to ask. To address this issue, we used Sen’s capability approach to develop question categories and adopted a semi-structured interview...

Towards the maturation of design: From smart to wise products

Recent years have shown the introduction of several types of smart products. These products gather data about user behaviour and try to determine an optimal response, in order to make the user’s life easier. However, some smart products also lead to user behaviour that is undesirable. Hence, we would like to introduce a new design paradigm...