FOSTERING EUDAIMONIA
DESIGN TO SUPPORT VIRTUES AND PRACTICAL WISDOM
One-day workshop @ DIS 2025

ABOUT

Emerging technologies (e.g., generative AI) afford powerful ways of thinking, valuing, and acting. However, the design of technology embeds value judgments about what is worthwhile, and interactive technologies can both positively and negatively shape our decisions, influence our motivations, and form our habits. The question is: can we design them in a way that contributes to our ability to use our technologies prudently and cultivate sustainable psychological well-being, or eudaimonia? This is one of the grand challenges of HCI research.

Several philosophical traditions (and more recently, psychology) emphasize that character strengths, or virtues (e.g., courage, honesty, self-control, fairness, justice, care, generosity, etc.) dictate our behavior. But, to develop these character strengths, we have to learn what to pursue and how to act in everyday practical situations. Most human activities have developed an overarching conception of those personal qualities we admire and hold exemplary, and these qualities are demonstrated in our actions and interactions. The ability to identify these markers of human excellence, and evaluate whether our motives and actions are good, desirable, and worth pursuing with respect to the kind of person we want to emulate (and become), is the core function of the virtue of phronesis, or practical wisdom.

The aim of this one-day, in-person workshop is to bring together academics and professionals to discuss and clarify how phronesis (and other virtues) can be analyzed as motivation, behavior, and disposition in conjunction with technology-mediated action to derive methodologically sound principles for guiding design. We want to explore how design contributes to or hinders users from developing motivations and exercising virtues and practical wisdom that are crucial to flourishing, how designers can include virtues as guideposts in their design process, and how the effects of these design decisions could be evaluated empirically.

INTENDED AUDIENCE AND SUBMISSIONS

We welcome students, academics, and professionals from diverse backgrounds such as design, computing, philosophy and psychology. As long as you have an interest in melding ideas from various interdisciplinary backgrounds to guide design, you are at the right place. We welcome position papers, designs, and artworks as contributions to the workshop. Generally, your contribution should address a topic or challenge that can contribute to workshop discussions, including for example

Reports on ongoing or completed research projects,
Results from empirical studies,
Insights gained in case studies,
A summary of personal experience,
Conceptual or theoretical frameworks, or
Design methods or approaches

Should you choose to submit a position paper, please use the CEUR Workshop Proceedings template with a preferred length of 1 - 4 pages including references. All submissions can be made via via e-mail to hitesh.dhiman@th-owl.de or eileen.wemmer@th-owl.de. We will share the accepted contributions with all participants before the workshop. With your consent, we will publish the accepted position papers as CEUR-WS Proceedings. As a bonus, accepted authors will also have the option to publish an extended version of their paper as a chapter in a Springer book volume.

WORKSHOP TOPICS

We invite contributions including and related to:

Design patterns that support or hinder the cultivation of phronesis and other virtues in work or personal contexts.
How resources behind sustainable virtuous activity in everyday settings could inform design.
Design for excellence, growth, and meaning.
Practices that generate knowledge and motivation to support virtuous behavior.
Facilitators or barriers to include virtues in the design process.
Design approaches and methods to harness those motivations and behaviors that lead to sustainable well-being
Virtue ethics and design