What society experiences today as morally questionable design—from gendered toys for children to public benches that prevent sleeping—can be considered the aftermath of an underdeveloped foundation for systematic ethical reflection in design methodologies. Although designing is an inherently moral activity, research on how to recognize and handle ethical questions and moral dilemmas in early (conceptual) design activities is scarce. In this article, we use an interdisciplinary lens to analyze and respond to the challenges of bridging moral psychology, ethics of technology, and design methodologies. For this, we introduce the concept of moral engagement in design, which is inspired by Moral Disengagement Theory. Finally, we propose five preliminary considerations for enacting moral engagement in design practices. These considerations form an interdisciplinary bridge to help us reflect on the moral dimensions of methodological choices in conceptual design practices.

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The influence of design on wellbeing and happiness in research is growing across various design domains, including products, services, systems, and environments. Despite the existence of theories addressing wellbeing and happiness, a challenge remains to bring them to life through applied design studies and reflections involving these domains, which we touch upon in this editorial. In this theme track, we focus on contributions from design in fulfilling the societal need to promote wellbeing and happiness, aligned with the conference theme: Resistance, Recovery, Reflection, Reimagination. The insights from the papers presented in this editorial underscore the complexity of designing for wellbeing, encompassing individual and community levels across various domains. Embracing a multidisciplinary approach, leveraging technology, deepening our understanding of human behavior, and exploring innovative interventions that enhance well-being reflect our growth as a Special Interest Group within the Design Research Society.@en

This chapter introduces six insights from emotion knowledge that support a structured approach to emotion-driven design activities. In design processes, these insights can be used to structure consumer insights, to stimulate creativity, and to support communication within the design team, with clients and with consumers. The first three insights broaden the emotion repertoire by detailing how diverse, mixed, nuanced, and even negative emotions can enrich consumer experiences. The other three insights focus on the causes of consumer emotions. The fourth insight explains how emotion measurement can help understanding what people really care for. The fifth insight focuses on consumer dilemmas, indicating how these can be used to design emotionally relevant products and services. The sixth and final insight shows how opportunities for emotion-driven design can be increased with design that addresses emotions that are experienced in the context of consuming products and services.@en

Users often have conflicting concerns (i.e., dilemmas), such as ‘embracing change vs. following tradition.’ Design can resolve these dilemmas through simultaneously fulfilling conflicting user concerns. This paper proposes three abstraction levels for framing user concerns when formulating dilemmas. In a large-scale industry project, we identified that dilemmas can be formulated
and resolved at different abstraction levels. Based on these preliminary findings, we developed a structured way to formulate dilemmas, which involves using three different types of concerns (i.e., product-, activity-, and identity-focused concerns). In this framework, product-focused concerns represent the most concrete concern level and identity-focused concerns
represent the most abstract level. Sixty master-level design students were asked to formulate a dilemma evoked by a product of their own choice and to create design ideas to resolve this dilemma. The results showed that dilemmas involving all concern levels can be an input for ideation, with the ‘most abstract yet informative’ dilemma being the most inspiring. In addition,
we found that design can resolve dilemmas in several distinct ways, where each dilemma-resolving strategy comes with opportunities and challenges.
Consciously formulating and examining alternative dilemma formulations
can create opportunities that might otherwise not be considered as input
for ideation.@en

You have bought a bag of candy to keep yourself entertained while watching movies in the comfort of your home. Your intention is to keep the candy bag in your cabinet for several weeks, and to only treat yourself with some candy when watching movies. However, you somehow find the bag emptied while watching your first movie. And although eating the delicious candy by the handful was certainly enjoyable, you also feel guilty for finishing the entire bag at once. This is only one example of many dilemmas we encounter in everyday life. In this thesis, dilemmas are defined as experiences with three main ingredients: (1) mutually exclusive choices, (2) conflicting concerns, and (3) mixed emotions. Figure 1 shows the framework of dilemmas, which illustrates these ingredients related to the conflict between enjoying candy while watching a movie versus eating moderately to maintain good health (see Chapter 5). The articulation of these three ingredients enables us to provide a more elaborate definition of dilemmas:
People experience a dilemma when they are faced with two mutually exclusive choices, both of which touch upon their personal concerns, and the simultaneous fulfillment of both choices is challenging, if not impossible, to obtain or achieve. Because of this challenge, people experience both positive and negative emotions toward each alternative.@en

This paper suggests that designers can frame user behaviour in terms of the conflicts between long-term goals and immediate desires (i.e. self-control dilemmas), and address these conflicts by facilitating the pursuit of long-term goals. A phenomenological study provided an understanding of self-control dilemmas and the strategies people use to deal with these dilemmas. Based on this understanding, this paper proposes a framework for analysing self-control dilemmas and three supporting design strategies. The framework can act as an analysis tool when distinguishing between long-term goals and immediate desires, and the design strategies can facilitate generation of ideas that can address self-control dilemmas. Understanding these human principles offers novel opportunities for products, services, or policies that contribute to subjective well-being@en

Personal dilemmas can be valuable starting points for user-centred design. Since dilemmas prevail in everyday life, designers can identify many dilemmas relevant for a given design brief. It can therefore be a challenge to choose a target dilemma as a means to frame an appropriate problem space. To address this challenge, this paper proposes seven qualities of 'design-worthy' dilemmas. These key qualities were derived from a cross-comparison of four dilemma-driven design cases, and were clustered in three categories: 1) relevance for target users; 2) potential to inspire design ideas; 3) meaningful formulation of conflicting concerns. The qualities of design-worthy dilemmas explicate the considerations designers have when selecting a target dilemma, and thus, they can facilitate introspection and discussion in problem framing. In addition, the case studies demonstrate the main activities involved in dilemma-driven design, namely discovery, definition, and application.@en

Traditional design approaches stimulate the creation of products that make daily interactions more efficient, comfortable, and pleasant. In contrast, provocative design approaches, such as critical design, have a different focus: they aim to challenge the status quo through products that expose assumptions and stimulate discussion. In this paper, we argue that intentionally triggering personal dilemmas is a novel design approach that may be a means to enabling self-reflection. In line with this, this paper proposes three design strategies for triggering dilemmas. These strategies are explained through existing designs and supported by design ideas created using them. Our findings indicate that triggering dilemmas is a counter- intuitive design intention, which can be supported by exercises that facilitate perspective taking and stalling moral judgment. We conclude with a discussion on the overlap between triggering dilemmas and other provocative design fields. @en

This chapter introduces six insights from emotion knowledge that support a structured approach to emotion-driven design activities. In design processes, these insights can be used to structure consumer insights, to stimulate creativity, and to support communication within the design team, with clients and with consumers. The first three insights broaden the emotion repertoire by detailing how diverse, mixed, nuanced, and even negative emotions can enrich consumer experiences. The other three insights focus on the causes of consumer emotions. The fourth insight explains how emotion measurement can help understanding what people really care for. The fifth insight focuses on consumer dilemmas, indicating how these can be used to design emotionally relevant products and services. The sixth and final insight shows how opportunities for emotion-driven design can be increased with design that addresses emotions that are experienced in the context of consuming products and services.@en

A potent way of designing for emotion is to design for concerns. However, people have multiple, and often, conflicting concerns. Such conflicts create emotional dilemmas: One may need to spend a Sunday afternoon working to meet a deadline, and at the same time, wish to attend a birthday party. In this paper, we consider conflicting concerns as a design opportunity: Any of the concerns can be a starting point for designing products or services that appeal to the users. However, we propose that the tension created by the conflict can be more inspiring than the involved concerns in isolation. In this paper, we present an analysis of 109 existing products through which we identify three directions these products seem to use to address users' dilemmas. These directions are resolving dilemmas, moderating dilemmas, and triggering dilemmas. We discuss the similarities and differences between these directions and their potential contribution to design fields such as designing for emotions and designing for subjective wellbeing.@en