Oral Presentation 6th World Congress on Positive Psychology 2019

Designing Happiness: Leveraging Technology to Improve Well-Being (#264)

Stephen M. Schueller 1
  1. University of California, Irvine, Chicago, CA, United States

Technologies are increasingly shaping our lives and are becoming more prevalent and pervasive throughout the world. As such, many people have turned to technologies for its potential to create scalable solutions to improve well-being resulting in a variety of online websites, mobile apps, video games, virtual reality interactions, and other examples of technologies built on positive psychology principles or intended as positive psychological interventions. Thus far, however, these technologies have not resulted in an overwhelming increase in the gross tonnage of world happiness and technology itself has sparked many debates on whether it has deleterious impacts on people’s well-being. In this presentation, I will discuss the importance of design perspectives to contribute to development of these technologies and the affordances technologies offer to increase well-being. I will provide examples from my own work in co-designing technologies with children to promote happiness and building a peer-powered network capable of providing emotional support. In light of this work, I will discuss what future technologies might look like that incorporate positive psychology and aim to increase people’s well-being as well as design approaches might contribute to the goal of positive psychology more broadly.  

  1. Morris, R. R., Schueller, S. M., & Picard, R. W. (2015). Efficacy of a Web-based, crowdsourced peer-to-peer cognitive reappraisal platform for depression: randomized controlled trial. Journal of medical Internet research, 17(3), e72. Morris, R. R., Kouddous, K., Kshirsagar, R., & Schueller, S. M. (2018). Towards an artificially empathic conversational agent for mental health applications: System design and user perceptions. Journal of medical Internet research, 20(6), e10148. Yarosh, S., & Schueller, S. M. (2017). “Happiness inventors”: informing positive computing technologies through participatory design with children. Journal of medical Internet research, 19(1), e14.