Design thinking in positive psychology: the development of a product-service combination that stimulates happiness-enhancing activities

This paper presents an exploration of how knowledge drawn from the positive psychology domain can be used to design products and services that contribute to the happiness of the users. Two distinctions are proposed to structure initiatives in well-being driven design: activity- versus product-focus, and promise- versus problem-focus. A design case is reported in which a product-service system was created with the main function to stimulate people to actively increase their levels of happiness. Finally, an appeal is made for a further exploration of how design thinking can contribute to positive psychology; to investigate how creating products that deliberately stimulate people’s subjective well-being can be a means for both validating and substantiating the current contributions of the positive psychology movement.