Designing for happiness may sound like an ambitious goal—yet it is a central and attainable ambition within human-centred design. Research shows that focusing explicitly on users’ wellbeing is not only desirable but also instrumental in creating products and services that have lasting, positive impact. The Design for Happiness Deck offers a structured, evidence-based way to do exactly that.
Developed at the Delft Institute of Positive Design, the deck translates the Positive Design framework (Desmet & Pohlmeyer, 2013, 2017) into a practical tool for design education, research, and professional practice. It supports designers in moving from the broad concept of “happiness” to manageable, actionable components that can directly inspire ideation, analysis, and decision-making.
What the deck offers
The deck consists of three complementary card sets, each representing one of the key pathways to human happiness:
- Pleasure – wellbeing that arises from positive sensations, emotions, and enjoyable moments
- Personal Significance – wellbeing derived from pursuing meaningful goals and recognising one’s own growth and achievements
- Virtue – wellbeing that stems from acting in ways that reflect one’s moral values and character strengths
Each set provides a typology of 24 elements (24 pleasures, 24 human goals, and 24 virtues), resulting in a total of 72 cards. These “building blocks” of wellbeing give designers immediate access to rich human-experience insights that can be used to sharpen design intentions, compare alternative concepts, or articulate the targeted forms of wellbeing a design aims to evoke.
How to use it
The Design for Happiness Deck is intentionally flexible. Whether you are exploring user needs, generating new design directions, evaluating concepts, or facilitating team discussions, the cards serve as prompts that keep wellbeing at the centre of the design process. Many designers use them to:
- trigger new perspectives during ideation
- clarify which types of wellbeing a design aims to support
- justify design decisions with theory-based arguments
- communicate wellbeing intentions within multidisciplinary teams
Open-access availability
The deck is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). You may share the material freely for non-commercial purposes, provided you give proper credit and do not alter the original files.
You can download the following resources:
The full card set and the manual: Downloadable PDF
A Spanish version: Downloadable PDF
Authorship
The Design for Happiness Deck was created by researchers and alumni of the Delft Institute of Positive Design.
Concept and content: Anna Pohlmeyer, Jay Yoon, Pieter Desmet
Design and image production: Christiaan Kieft, Simon Jimenez
Spanish translation: Valeria Torres Ruiz
How to cite
Delft Institute of Positive Design (2017). Design for Happiness Deck. Delft: Delft University of Technology. ISBN: 978-94-92516-86-2.
The tool is based on the Positive Design framework:
Desmet, P.M.A., & Pohlmeyer, A.E. (2013). Positive design: An introduction to design for subjective well-being. International Journal of Design, 7(3), 5–19.
Pohlmeyer, A.E., & Desmet, P.M.A. (2017). From good to the greater good. In J. Chapman (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Product Design (pp. 469–486). London: Routledge.
The typologies used in the cards are grounded in the work of Jay Yoon, Pieter Desmet & Anna Pohlmeyer (positive emotions); Martin Ford & Charles Nichols (human goals); Christopher Peterson & Martin Seligman (character strengths). Full references are provided in the deck colophon.
Publication date:
November 2018
