Designing for Meaningfulness in Life: creating new meaning in products and services to enhance psychological meaningfulness

Abstract

In a world of breathtaking material affluence with ever-increasing diversity of values and options in life, people easily lose meaning in life and pursue meaningfulness stemmed from more psychological desires such as purpose, transcendence and spiritual fulfillment.

This paper aims at investigating into the approach of designing new meaning in product and service which enhance psychological meaningfulness in life. As theoretical bases for empirical study, this paper reviewed two theoretical realms: a) meaningfulness in life from positive psychology as an ideal psychological state, b) design-driven innovation which strategically makes new meaning in product or service. In empirical part, the semi-structured interviews were conducted with six design experts to investigate how designers create new meaning in product or service for meaningfulness in an end-user’s life.

The finding suggests that designing meaningfulness is not as straightforward as design-driven innovation which deepens internal vision in future (inside-out) and unlike design thinking model which emphasizes on empathetic understanding of users (outside-in). It’s a hybrid approach of outside-in approach exploring the existing meaning in an end-user’s life and inside-out approach envisioning the possible future life scenario and meaningful experience in the envisioned context. The literature review revealed six core elements of meaningfulness constituted of purpose, value, significance, engagement, narrativity and connectivity. The finding implies the possibility of enhancing meaningfulness in end-users’ life if core elements of meaningfulness are used in conceptualizing ideal meaningful experience in future. It was also found that designing new meaning in product or service requires the behavioral change of end-users toward the envisioned ideal state. To drive a change, the behavioral science could be utilized to inspire the short-term motivation, and it needs to be balanced with the true meaning to the end-user in the long-run.