This year’s kick-off lecture of Koc University Design, Technology and Society PhD program will be given by Prof. Dr. Marc Hassenzahl. The lecture “Designing Wellbeing” will be held in Sevgi Gonul Cultural Center on September 21, 2017 at 14.00.There will be shuttles from Hacıosman Metro station in every 15 minutes.

Koç University
Design, Technology and Society PhD. Program
Fall 2017 Kick-off Lecture,
“Designing Wellbeing”
Prof. Dr. Marc Hassenzahl
Koc University Sevgi Gönül Cultural Center
21 September 2017
14.00 – 16.00

Almost any meaningful everyday activity involves technology. Take staying in contact with friends and family as an example. Nowadays this can be done through phones, SMS, Skype, Facebook, WhatsApp, email and many other ways. While the goal is always to feel close to each other, this feeling often quite subtly differs depending on the technology we use. In other words: Whether we talk to each other, send short messages or pictures and movies is not only a technical matter – it impacts and shapes our experience of closeness. An experience-driven, wellbeing-oriented design acknowledges this. It aims at designing technology in a way to maintain or even improve the wellbeing presumably created through its use. At the heart of this is interaction design. Interaction design is foremost responsible for making the possibilities technology promises accessible and meaningful to people’s everyday life. Consequently, interaction should be designed with psychological wellbeing in mind. However, this is a challenging endeavor. It requires an understanding of what wellbeing is and how it could be systematically addressed through the design of things and interaction. In this talk, Marc Hassenzahl will provide a brief introduction into the psychology of wellbeing and experience-driven design. He will then discuss the opportunities and challenges of this approach through various own project examples taken from research and industry.

Dr. Marc Hassenzahl is a professor for “Ubiquitous Design / Experience and Interaction” at the University of Siegen, Germany. He combines his training in psychology with a love for interaction design. With his group of designers and psychologists, he explores the theory and practice of designing pleasurable, meaningful and transforming interactive technologies. Marc is the author of “Experience Design. Technology for all the right reasons”, co-author of “Psychologie in der nutzerzentrierten Produktgestaltung. Mensch-Technik-Interaktion-Erlebnis” (“People, Technology, Interaction, Experience”) and many peer-reviewed papers at the seams of psychology, design research and interaction/industrial design. One of these publications have been recently translated into Turkish in 2016, and published in Cogito Journal (Vol. 83).