Pro-social helping activities are activities that are intended by the helper to mainly benefit the receiver. Research from WeHelpen showed that offering passive help through asking “if there is anything I can do, please let me know” does not often result in the helping behavior. Asking for help is difficult because it does not fit in the idea of being autonomous and self-reliance.
In this thesis, tools are developed to encourage people to actively perform the helping behavior. These tools consist of awareness, guidance and triggers. They are implemented in daily life products, to inspire, guide and remind people to perform the helping behavior.

Goal.
At times high care patients have no distraction from the negative experiences that come with their hospitalization, a lot of negative feelings arise. They often feel lonely, for not having the possibility to play with peers. Luckily, the new playroom can create opportunities for these children to interact with peers. To include bed-bound children as well, the design goal was to come up with a concept that would: create interactions in the playroom that give high care patients, aged 6-11 years old, a sense of belonging towards each other, also when confined to their beds.

Challenge.
Although all these patients have in common that they are hospitalized on the high care ward, they also know many differences in interests, development and physical abilities. To provide the patients with a sense of belonging towards each other, the challenge was to create a concept that every child can use in its way, but at the same time enables them to play and socially interact with each other.

The final design.
‘Het Interactieve Bouwlab’ is a play environment in the playroom where children can build with LEGO in an interactive environment. To create a meaningful interaction, the bed-bound child can control this environment via the ‘Bouwlab’ App, while also sharing a video and audio connection. The concept is designed with no predefined game rules to support open-ended play in which the users can create their games and building plans. However, to spark the imagination, a weekly theme will be announced where the users can build for.

Evaluation.
The user tests showed that ‘Het Interactieve Bouwlab’ has the potential to give the patients a sense of belonging towards each other since it stimulated social play and made the children willing to interact with each other.

This thesis is the final result of the graduation project of the master programme Design for Interaction at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at the TU Delft (Delft, The Netherlands). The project is done for the Delft Institute of Positive Design in collaboration with Marten van Doorn from Bartimeus. When glasses or contact lenses are not sufficient enough to correct someone’s vision, visually impairment is diagnosed. The Netherlands counts 345.000 people who are visually impaired or blind. On estimate, 2020 will count 380.000 visually impaired people (Keunen, 2011). This is an increase of 20% since 2009, due to aging and diabetes (Bartimeus, 2017).  Especially when it comes to mobility, visually impaired people (VIPs) are continuously challenged. They use a cane to detect passing obstacles and recognition points. However, the cane does not lead the route to these recognitions points which make the visually impaired in need for other assisting solutions. Dependency and autonomy seem to clash with each other: Assistive technologies provide additional certainty within the field of mobility but often taking away a piece of autonomy. Autonomy is defined as “freedom from external control or influence; independence” (Stevenson & Lindberg, 2010). Being autonomous is a psychological need for well-being (Ryff & Keyes, 1995), which will be the primary focus of this project. This result into the following assignment: Assignment Design a mobility tool for visually impaired people that lets them experience a feeling of autonomy. New developments seem to fail because of their distance from real-world settings (Loomis, Klatzky &  Giudice, 2012; Maidenbaum, 2014). Besides, Loomis et al. states that many assistive technologies are a result of a solution to a practical problem and that the outcome is based on the type of engineering that is available. This approach to new product development is known as the engineering trap. Therefor the primary approach is to stay as close as possible to the real-world setting by designing for autonomy with empathy with the main goal to contribute to the well-being of visually impaired people in the field of mobility.  This is done by looking the context from different angels: : the own experience lens, the VIP experience lens ant the expert lens-  This is done by doing research and design explorations. These explorations create insights of VIP’s daily life -including benefits and struggles- required theoretical research, own experiences (as being visually impaired), observations and interviews. This resulted in a list of VIP superpowers, mobility mindsets, main mobility concerns, four dimensions of autonomy a list for characteristics for autonomous assistive tools. These insights are translated into an opportunity to design. In the current situation, being in control is an important aspect for VIPs to be able to know the route, walk smoothly and prevent mistakes, although the definition of autonomy is about freedom from external factors. There seems to be an opportunity to design for impulsivity within the mobility context. Therefore, the following question will serve as the leading question for the next explorations:  Opportunity Is there room for impulsivity while being in control? To be able to understand the meaning of impulsivity in the VIP mobility context, four cycles of design explorations are done. Every iteration loop starts with a different definition of impulsivity based on the previous iteration. Next, ideas are generated and evaluated on autonomy. These iterations resulted in the final impulsivity definition, the three design characteristics and the design goal. The definition of impulsivity states that; Impulsivity definition Make a small mental detour. In the current situation, VIPs have a number of fixed routes in their mind. They do need help in this route if they got lost in orientation due to distractions caused by noisy traffic, obstacle or noisy weather conditions. Mostly they ask for confirmation when they ask for help, to retake their control on their current orientation. It is established that one of the design characteristics describes that feeling autonomous is not about receiving less help, but it is about the type of help. So how can the design support VIPs in their mobility activity, instead of helping them?  If VIPs feel supported, it will open the possibility that there is no need for 100% focus. So they will walk their route as good as possible and have the possibility to make a small mental detour by paying attention to the unpractical elements of the route. Therefore, the following design brief is formulated:  Design brief Design a supporting device that illustrates the current position within a preprogrammed known route on demand, that opens the opportunity for a small mental detour by paying attention to the unpractical elements of the environment. The design translates this design goal into the concept design: Walkmen. The design Walkmen is a support tool which is a GPS connected voice recorder on your smart-phone. With Walkmen, you can track routes and create your mobility tool, which can be used as support tool. The design is tested from different perspectives: my own experience, VIP’s experience and experts’ discussion. The perspectives are the same as those used in explorations done at the beginning of the project. Overall, the tests made me realize that the need for concept design is urgent. People are intrigued by freedom that the device provides, so they are able to make their own personal reference tool which is easily accessible. As an additional deliverable, a booklet is made with principles for designers, who want to design for autonomy for people who are in need for assistance. To conclude, daily life is not designed for VIPs, but designed by and for sighted people. Unfortunately, many tools for VIPs are nowadays designed by sighted people to provide assistance to fill the gap of the missing visual senses. Within this project it is found that the mobility tool for VIPs should be a support tool instead of an assistive tool in order to evoke a feeling of autonomy. Walkmen is a result of the approach taken which includes the autonomous design characteristics and, according to the validation, evokes a feeling of autonomy.

In human-product interactions, pleasure has many different shades. We can, for example, be proud of using an eco-friendly detergent, be all aflutter in anticipation of a planned trip when looking at a calendar application or experience a feeling of cathartic relief when playing a mobile phone game. Although these experiences are all pleasurable, each is different from the other in terms of the feelings they engender, the conditions that evoke them and how they influence people’s thoughts and actions. Some people are more aware of these nuances and better able than others to articulate positive emotional states. This difference is called ‘Positive Emotional Granularity’ (PEG) (Tugade, Fredrickson, & Feldman Barrett, 2004). PEG reflects the degree to which a person is able to represent positive emotions with precision and specificity. This thesis focuses on designers’ PEG, and proposes that having an awareness of nuances between positive emotions can be advantageous for designers in their endeavour to generate positive emotional experiences. Design research has traditionally focused on generalised pleasure or liking, paying little attention to nuances in positive emotions. Consequently, little is known of either the implications of differentiating positive emotions in design processes or ways to support designers in this endeavour. The aim of this thesis is to develop an understanding of how designers’ nuanced understanding of positive emotions can be harnessed and how doing so can contribute to design processes. The research question was, ‘how can designers be supported in developing and applying a systematic understanding of nuanced positive emotions?’ The overarching approach encompassing the research activities was ‘research through design’, in which the act of designing new solutions and reflecting on the processes is regarded as a means of generating knowledge (Stappers, 2007). A series of design tools and techniques that explained the distinctiveness of positive emotions was conceptualised for the purpose of this research and tested by designers. This research contributes to the field of experience design by elucidating how PEG can add value to design processes, and by providing tools that support designers in developing their understanding of positive emotions and their abilities to select and design for nuanced and distinct positive emotions. Eight studies were conducted, each resulting in a set of new findings.@en