Now it was just talked about the development, the design and the methods behind it. What does such a concrete procedure look like, Michael?
Prof. Dr. Michael Burmester: Anne has just said it already. We have developed certain procedures to integrate these somewhat unwieldy theoretical models, which come from psychology, into the design processes. In addition, we also pursued a second very helpful approach for designers. For this we collected the positive experiences in a certain context, for example in a work environment, through special experience interviews.
In a research project we conducted 400 interviews, after we sorted out a few, because the answers were not really positive experiences, we still had 360 experiences left. We combined these into categories. This resulted in a total of 17 experience categories that fit work contexts and can be used to develop helpful ideas. These include, for example, something like "creating something together," which in turn expresses the group's common goals and teamwork. In our Mittelstand 4.0 Competence Center Usability , we develop such procedures and we also further optimize existing procedures.
That is, you have filtered out certain categories from a huge treasure trove of data from these interviews that are generally important for positive experiences and needs in the work context. And after that you can design the workplace or products, is that right?
Prof. Dr. Michael Burmester: Exactly. With these categories, we know what is important in the work. For this I have three examples:
1. Keeping track of one's own progress:
People have in the working world a psychological need for competence. Appropriate experience categories for this are "getting feedback" or "having an overview". The appropriate feedback for this you get either from a computer or from someone in the colleagues.
2. Group work and gratitude:
Inside a created communication tool, we have developed a way that you can express gratitude to each other, for example, for a successful group work. However, the gratitude must be exclusive and between two people. Because otherwise it is rather a kind of "liking" and that would be public, which in turn could contribute to a competition, which may be motivating, but is experienced rather negatively.
3. Assistance systems and contribute to something higher:
We have implemented various positive experience categories in design ideas in an assistance system for production in a project. On the one hand, the system assists employees with the order in which certain components must be screwed together. On the other hand, the system can indicate how important the completed work is for the company, for the customer or for the team, e.g. it can indicate who will continue working with my work result. This creates a feeling of "contributing to something higher", that is, something that goes beyond myself, which is a very profound, positive experience.
In recent months, we have seen a kind of digitalization push. How can we ensure human-centeredness or emotions even in a digitized world of work?
Prof. Dr. Michael Burmester: We need to understand work a bit more broadly than is often the case. Work is much more than just doing one's tasks, because it is a big part of our lives. In psychology, there used to be something like job satisfaction. That disappeared at some point, but we want to get back to that. And the good thing is, with digitization , we have many opportunities to do what is often overlooked. Networked digital systems have more knowledge about work processes and can display them, better than analog systems ever could.