Towards happiness:

This chapter suggests possibility-driven design as an alternative to the common problem-driven approach. A first part explores the concept of "possibilities" and how it relates to happiness and well-being. We further develop the notion of designing for the pleasurable life and the good life through a number of exemplary design cases. Each takes a possibility-driven approach, thereby highlighting potential challenges and merits. By that, we hope to lay ground for an approach to design, which draws upon happiness to motivate the design of future technologies. This will help establishing a culture of humane innovation, which understands technology as a possibility to improve life directly. From problems to possibilities Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), interaction design, and industrial design mostly favour a problem-driven approach to design (see Roozenburg & Eekels, 1995). It understands design as an activity focused on removing problems (i.e., to make something easier, cleaner, cheaper, safer or smaller), often motivated by very concrete discrepancies between the current and a seemingly ideal way of doing something. The aspiration is to make the world a better place through solving its problems. A typical example is the do-it-yourself soccer ball made from adhesive tape designed by Marti Guixe (see Figure 1).