What is Positive Design?
“Life is best designed by considering a desired end in mind and then planning for flourishing. We then experience greater purpose, fulfillment, and joy by living that vision forward—with authenticity, meaningful relationships, mental agility, resilience, and continual adaptation through life’s changes.”
- Dr. David M. Harris, LCSW
Positive Design is a framework for intentional well-being and human flourishing. It integrates Positive Psychology’s focus on well-being, positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment (PERMA) with Design Thinking’s human-centered process of empathy, define, ideate, prototype and test (experimentation), and refinement.
Rather than assuming life can be fully planned, Positive Design helps people create guiding principles, meaningful goals, and adaptive strategies for living with greater purpose. It begins with understanding your story, strengths, relationships, and unique challenges. From there, Positive Design supports a generative process in which knowledge is co-constructed, new possibilities are explored, ideas are tested, experience becomes feedback, and the path forward is refined over time.
In this way, Positive Design is both reflective and action-oriented. It encourages you to imagine the life you want to build, identify what matters most, and make intentional moves toward healthier habits, meaningful connection, resilience, and growth.
The following sections provide an overview of the theoretical foundations that inform the Positive Design approach.
Positive Psychology
Often credited as the “Father of Positive Psychology,” Dr. Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania identifies five measurable elements that contribute to well-being and human flourishing through the PERMA model. Human flourishing is the experience of functioning well across multiple dimensions of life, including positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. (See the video below)
(available: https://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/learn/wellbeing)
Positive emotions - how to feel good
Engagement - how to be fully absorbed in activities (flow state)
Relationships - how to be authentically connected to others
Meaning - how to lead a purposeful existence
Accomplishment - how to achieve
Design Thinking
Adapted from the dSchool work at Stanford University, Design Thinking, as a process, focuses on understanding the need(s) of a person/client/team as the core of defining, developing and implementing solutions. It consists of five parts:
Empathize: Work to fully understand the experience of the client for whom you are supporting the design process. Do this through observation, interaction, and immersing yourself in their experiences/story.
Define: Process and synthesize the findings from your empathy work in order to form a client-centered view that will guide your design collaboration.
Ideate: Explore a wide variety of possible solutions through generating a diverse set, allowing you to step beyond the obvious and explore a range of ideas.
Prototype: Transform the ideas into a concrete plan of action, learning and developing more empathy as you explore potential outcomes.
Test: Use observations and feedback to refine prototype ideas, learn more about the clients' adaptation(s), and refine the original client-centered view.
In Positive Design, PERMA helps clarify what flourishing may include, while Design Thinking provides a process for moving from insight to intentional action. Together, these foundations support Positive Design as a generative, human-centered process for designing well-being through reflection, experimentation, feedback, and refinement. This concept is displayed below, coupled with an overarching process rooted in participatory process design: divergence-convergence (Cretney, et al., 2011). This is a cyclical process that is repeated as often as necessary to achieve desired results.
Divergence: the phase where collaboration includes asking the right questions. This is an unpacking, insight-based process that is generative.
Emergence: the "Grow Zone" where diverse ideas cause a stretch for all involved in the design process. You often must stretch your bias to find new solutions. Emergence is where insight, stretch, and co-constructed meaning begin to take shape.
Convergence: the action phase, a more focused implementation with desired results in mind.
Figure 1 - A Framework for Positive Design futher illustrates how these foundations come together as Positive Design. The framework connects flourishing, human-centered planning, and the divergence–emergence–convergence cycle to show how people can move from insight and possibility toward meaningful action and adaptive well-being.
(*adapted from Desmet, P., & Pohlmeyer, A. 2013 Nov 27. Positive Design: An Introduction to Design for Subjective Well-Being. International Journal of Design [Online] 7:3. Available: http://www.ijdesign.org/index.php/IJDesign/article/view/1666/595#2
Figure 1 - A Framework for Positive Design
Finally, beyond serving as a conceptual framework and process, Positive Design is also guided by a set of values about how human flourishing is supported and sustained. These values are reflected in the Positive Design Manifest below.
Positive Design Manifest
(available:https://diopd.org/our-mission/)
Positive Design….
(1) creates possibilities
Positive Design envisions and realizes optimistic futures. Rather than merely reducing people’s problems, it offers them opportunities to improve their wellbeing.
(2) supports human flourishing
Positive Design uplifts people. It enables and inspires people to develop their talents, to increase their freedom, to deepen their relationships, and to contribute to their communities.
(3) enables meaningful activities.
Positive Design encourages people to balance pleasure and virtue. It stimulates people to engage in meaningful activities that are rooted in their deeply held values.
(4) embraces rich experiences.
Positive Design affects the complete pallet of human experiences. Beyond short-term pleasures, it focuses on lasting experiences that involve both positive and negative emotions.
(5) accepts responsibility
Positive Design is genuine in its purpose and intention. It takes responsibility for its short- and long-term impact on individuals as well as on communities and society.