Keywords

1 Lifestyle to Be the Object of Design

For a long time, lifestyle has been an important research object in philosophy, sociology, economics and other fields, demonstrating the importance of life style research to social development. In the German ideology, Marx and Engels considered the establishment of free life as the development goal of human society, and proposed that the development process of human society is “the production process of life” [1]. In addition to viewing lifestyle as a manifestation of social development, there are also a number of studies linking lifestyle to human health. The world health organization (WHO) has noted that “the greatest threat to humanity in the 21st century is lifestyle disease.” In 1948, the world health organization proposed the definition of health as: “Health is not only the absence of disease and infirmity, but also the maintenance of physical, psychological and social adaptation in all its aspects” [2]. In fact, social adaptation refers to people’s ability and coping methods to deal with various complicated things in life, including how to deal with interpersonal relations, how to face difficulties and challenges, and how to change bad living habits, reflected in the exploration of life experience and life quality.

The rapid development of information technology, big data computing and artificial intelligence has brought new experiences and unlimited imagination to lifestyle. Under such a technological background, how to use information technology to create a better way of lifestyle has become a problem that many enterprises are discussing in recent years. The appearance of iPhone has not only changed the interaction between people and mobile phones, but also redefined the concept of “mobile phone”. Mobile phone has changed from a product with communication function to a comprehensive life service terminal satisfying people’s social life, shopping life, entertainment experience and other behavioral activities.

WeChat, emerged in 2011, has become the largest and most comprehensive platform to communicate, socialize and find life-assisting tools in China. Intelligent household life also provides users with a new lifestyle. The user can control appliances by various sensors (e.g., TV, refrigerator, air conditioning, lights, curtains, etc.). These products even can teach themselves to learn users’ habits and provide a better user experience at the right time and context.

It is easy to say that the content of design has expanded from meeting personalized needs to social ones, from single service to comprehensive ones. The designed objects deal with non-material things which are much more complicated and comprehensive and relating to life, including emotion, behavior, relationship, experience and meaning. As the emergence of products and services change people’s lifestyle, then whether lifestyle could be the object of design?

Herbert Simon, a famous social scientist made a clear definition in The Science of the Artificial: “Design is when people spare no effort in changing the current situation into their expectation” [3]. He realized that people are always walking from the current situation to a much satisfied future, and he also admitted that design is the way for people to achieve that goal. Richard Buchanan has proposed a ‘Four orders of design’ [4], and he believed that design has transformed from product design, graphic design and environment design to another dimension, including symbols, things, behaviors and meaning. The aim of design is shown in how to embed meaning into technology in the modern society, resulting in a reasonable lifestyle and value. Carnegie Mellon University has mentioned Transition Design since 2014, which claimed that design should focus on the changes of life and a more sustainable development of society. Design could affect lifestyle and guide it. In other words, lifestyle has already become an object of design.

2 The Research of Different Disciplines on Lifestyle

Scholars in sociology, economics, literature, drama, rhetoric and other disciplines have all made different comments on lifestyle from different perspectives (see Fig. 1), such as the interaction between individuals and society, class and status, lifestyle and consumption behavior, human experience, life happiness and so on.

Fig. 1.
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The research perspective and main point of view of different discipline to lifestyle.

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Plato [5] and Aristotle [6] used to propose the philosophic thinking related to lifestyle and happiness. The sociologists in the early times considered lifestyle as a measurement of class and status. “Lifestyle”- this word was firstly created by Max Weber, a famous Germany sociologist and philosopher. Weber mentioned the idea of lifestyle in Class, Status, and Power and he thought lifestyle can help people distinguish a certain class of people from others [7]. Philosophers such as Dewey [8], Mead [9] mentioned that people’s experience and meaning appeared during the interaction between people and society. People’s lifestyle is not alone, and it will be affected by social environment. When people establish the society, they are building their own life. Schutz, Habermas [10] and other people took the perspective of behavior, admitting the fact that individual’s behaviors will affect society, and they thought people’s actions and social environment are closely related to and reinforced each other.

Western economists always study lifestyle and the way of consumption together. Weber and Veblen studied lifestyle from the perspective of consumption. Economists study lifestyle on three aspects: 1. Classify the market through lifestyle; 2. How lifestyle affect behaviors of consumers; and 3. the research on certain group of people’s lifestyle.

Although sociology and economics focused on lifestyle for a long time, most of them consider lifestyle as an influencing factor of social development and consuming behaviors, or study in the context of lifestyle. There is few design method or theory which consider lifestyle as the object of design in its subject.

3 Design Research on Lifestyle

The research on lifestyle design started from 1980s, and the number of researches became to increase after 21st century and have achieved certain results gradually. The number of researching institutions on lifestyle amounted to 572 units between 2003 and 2007. Table 1 has presented the top 10 researching institutions. What’s more, developed countries and those with well welfare focus much more on the research on lifestyle. The first Chinese researching institution on lifestyle is The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, ranking 60.

Table 1. Distribution of lifestyle design research institutions from 1991 to 2017.
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In design study, there has no powerful theoretical studying system, method and model been formed on this object. In China, the author searched “lifestyle and design” in journals, doctoral dissertation, master’s thesis, Chinese conferences, international conferences, newspaper and yearbook from CNKI, 4162 articles related to “lifestyle” and “design” are found. Most of these researches consider lifestyle as the context of design or conduct researches on targeted people. The researches on lifestyle mostly concentrate in healthcare, social development, economic development, city construction and other areas, which regards lifestyle as the object of design is few.

4 The Exploration of Elements of Lifestyle

Scholars from different disciplines have proposed the elements of lifestyle from their own perspectives. A western scholar Mead thought people’s life is the meaning system composed by people’s intention, social interactivity, environment and behaviors these four elements [9]. David Popenoe has mentioned in Sociology that social life comprises non-individual factors and individualized factors [11]. Non-individual factors including physical environment, culture, society, economy, technology, population and others. Physical environment refers to natural one and artificial one. Individual factors refer to people’s physiology, psychology and educational background.

4.1 Research Perspective

Lifestyle research, it is difficult to summarize the general law through big data because of the diversity and complexity of life itself. The motivations, decisions, emotions and experiences of people in different life situations are all affected by complex internal and external factors, and the answer cannot be obtained through conventional calculation formulas. As behavioral economist Richard H. Thaler has realized that the economic behavior of people are not always rational, he combined the human psychology and economics research, pay close attention to a lot of real life cases in people’s daily life, from man’s behavior, emotions, and even some “wrong” behavior of people’s consumption behaviors to find out Law of consumption behavior [12], the study won the 2017 Nobel Prize in economics. The author believes that lifestyle-oriented research, like Richard thaler’s economic research, the research and design should focus on life itself and the different behaviors and experiences of people in life situations. Therefore, this scientific research method is different from the quantitative research based on big data.

This research takes the perspective from “Experience” and explore the elements of lifestyle through “Inquiry” (questionnaire and in-dept interviews). Inquiry is a process to research on something that is vaguely-targeted, lacking clear meaning and influence. Words such as ‘uncertain, unsolved, confused’ are usually used to describe these things [13]. Inquiry means reclassifying things which are unclear and complicated (through finding the linkages among different things), then concluding a new package of perspective to view and understand things.

Dewey has mentioned in Art as Experience that human experience emerges from the interconnection between people’s mindset and physical things, or subjective and objective things [8]. Experience transferred the focus from the way of designing life to the meaning of designing the life. Professor Xiangyang Xin mentioned in his speech titled “from UX to EX” that “Experience not just as principles, but also as pathways that guide choices and purposes of our lives” [14]. Experience is not only a principle, but also a way to guide people’s choices and goals of life. In his speech, he also talked about “Experience shifts attention from designing means for living to designing meanings of lives” [14]. During the interaction between people and the world, the “experience” and “meaning” appeared. Experience is a social interaction, affecting our attitudes and behaviors towards things, and influence the cognitive meaning of things. People constantly change their relationship between themselves and society during the experiences, and creating their own meaning at the same time.

4.2 Research Analysis

Through online questionnaire, we get ideas of people’s recognition, attitude, perspective and expectation towards lifestyle, then analyzing the reasons and influencing factors and forming system of users’ lifestyle. Questionnaire mainly focus on two core problems: 1. The elements of lifestyle; 2. The influencing factors of lifestyle’s formation. This research has received 179 effective questionnaires. Among the interviewees, 44.5% of them are male, and 55.5% of them are female. In terms of age, 33% of them were born after 1980, 50.4% of them were born after 1990. As for educational background, 60.5% of them are bachelors, 26.1% of them are masters, and 6.7% of them are doctors or acquire much higher degree. From the perspective of job, 21.2% of them are government officials, public servants, and business managers. 16.1% of them are professionals, such as doctor and teacher. 27.9% of them are white-or blue-collars. 28% of them are students. In terms of income, 36.1% of them earn less than 5000, 27.7% of them ear between 5000 and 10000, 23.5% of them ear between 10000 and 20000, only 6.5% of them ear more than 30000. From the result of these date, it can be concluded that the participants of questionnaire cover all age groups, and the average degree is bachelor or higher, and most of them are middle-incomers.

The research has acquired nearly 800 pieces of vocabulary from questionnaire, including noun, verb, adjective; words describing the status quo and expectation. Through classification, only 237 pieces are left after combing words which have similar or the same meaning. Getting rid of the vocabulary which are different in meaning and appeared only once, the left vocabulary appeared between 2 to 5 times. Putting these vocabularies into two dimensions (see Fig. 2): individual’s internal side and social environment; long-term stability and short-term updates, analyze unique features and patterns in different quadrants.

Fig. 2.
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Word frequency analyze of lifestyle description.

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4.3 Four Elements of Lifestyle

With questionnaire and interviews into consideration, through classification and relevance analysis, we concluded the elements of lifestyle as (see Fig. 3): 1. Behaviors, including motivation, changes of behaviors and habits of behaviors. 2. rhythm, including intensity, repetition and duration. 3. relationship, including strong and weak relationship as well as roles. 4. Meaning, including intentional meaning and accidental meaning. These four elements can be considered as objects of design and can function as influencing factors of lifestyle.

Fig. 3.
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The four elements of lifestyle.

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First Element: Behavior.

Lifestyle refers to behaviors transformed from an unstable condition to a long-term and stable one and back to unstable one again. It is a cycling process. When a short-term behavior has developed into a long-term one, we can regard it has formed a lifestyle. The exploration on behaviors is always highly connected with people’s recognition, attitude, willingness, ability and other abilities. Behaviors can be considered as the direct response to all kinds of things when people stay in certain environment. Thus, the research on lifestyle is a research on people’s behavioral pattern.

The author concluded three sub-elements of lifestyle: motivation, changes of behaviors and habits of behaviors. The following Table 2 gives an explanation of these three sub-elements. Motivation is the early stage when we do everything. Motivation included internal and external ones. If a motivation did not persist, it may be a condition at that moment. The changes of behaviors base on the motivation, and it is a process to find an alternative behavior for a habitual one. The form of habits of behavior requires motivation and changes of behaviors. Attitudes and determination are the main reasons to form habits.

Table 2. Sub-elements of behaviors and explanation.
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Second Element: Rhythm.

Everyone has their own pace of life. Something happens once but has a far-reaching influence (a trip to Disney, for example, can be unforgettable); Something happens every day (such as eating, sleeping, etc.) but their presence seems can’t be felt. The study of rhythm often combined with “emotion” and “experience”, just as time passes quickly in happy moments while slowly in rough patch. In Having an Experience, John Dewey described the emotional, continuity, purpose, completeness and ideological characteristics of experience [8]. The elements of experience has mentioned in Making Meaning, they are duration, intensity, breadth, interaction, triggers and significance.

We combined the elements related to time and rhythm proposed by Michelle Berryman, the design director from THINK Interactive-a U.S. company, with the observation on interviews, Table 3 has concluded the sub-elements of life rhythm into: intensity, duration and repetition.

Table 3. Sub-elements of rhythm and explanation.
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Third Element: Relationship.

The interaction of human society is a process of adjusting oneself to the external environment. People can not avoid having relationship with different people, things and item to some extent. The sociologist Liz Spencer and Ray Pahl used “strong and weak relationship” to present the level of interpersonal relationship [15]. We always believe that people or things that are in strong relationship may affect our life dramatically, and strong relationship can bring more results that meet our expectations and interests. However, weak relationship also plays an important role in life. In 1973, The Strength of Weak Ties, a paper published by Dr. Mark Granovetter of Harvard University, proposed that Weak Ties have great potential in connecting communities and creating trust and connection between strangers [16]. One respondent mentioned that “Go to watch the movie or not, it decided on the comments on my WeChat moments. If three of my friends think it is good, I will go to the cinema”. It proves that people can gain more knowledge, expand social network, and obtain the reference for decision-making, etc. Weak relationship can much more easily and usually bring the experience and surprises out of expectation.

In our daily life, we can figure out the relationship not only from strong or weak relationship but also from individuals and society. Dewey once said: “People are not born to be human, but through social life. People can only define their roles from the interaction with society. In this way, the process that people establish their own lifestyle is the one that identify the relationship with other people.” Table 4 concludes “strong and weak relationship” as well as “role relationship” as sub-elements of relationship.

Table 4. Sub-elements of relationship and explanation.
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Forth Element: Meaning.

Meaning is the original motivation of behavior, the belief for people to insist on one thing and the reason to live. Meaning guides the direction and methods of life. Dewey has proposed in Experience and Nature that meaning is the aim, and it is a thing that people want to achieve.

The meaning of life has the same meaning in rhetoric, both can be generated in the specific circumstances of life. In rhetoric, it is believed that the material world is meaningless but people use rhetorical “language” to give meaning. Wittgenstein, an Austrian philosopher, put forward the theory of “use determines meaning” from the perspective of language in his “language game”. His famous definition “the meaning of a word is its use in language” [17]. Meaning in specific context, is located in the form of life, is the meaning of interaction gives people’s life. For example, a chair itself doesn’t make sense, but if it’s the chair you sat on when you met your boyfriend first time, it has a special meaning for you. Therefore, the meaning of the same product is not the same all the time, but will change with different situations (such as who uses it, how to use it, and the experience of using it).

In design, we always say we need to satisfy users’ demand, which are the source of meaning. Meaning refers to everything that people think are valuable in their life and in line with their value as well as interest. Not all meanings meet the expectation of people. The emergence of some meaning may be accidently and out of expectation. Thus, Table 5 concludes the sub-elements of meaning into intentional meaning and accidental meaning.

Table 5. Sub-elements of meaning and explanation.
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Evaluate the Four Elements.

The case study method is widely used in sociology, anthropology, management and other fields, especially in constructing new theories or verifying existing theories [18]. Typical case study is one of the commonly used methods in modern design research [19]. In case studies, many scholars advocate “typical case studies” as the center to carry out detailed exploration, description and explanation of the case [20].

In the survey, respondents believed that software have the greatest impact on lifestyle, such as WeChat, Alipay, takeaway software and Taobao. Some respondents mentioned that physical products, such as smartphones and high-speed trains had also brought important changes to lifestyle.

Richard Buchanan has mentioned in Philosophy and Rhetoric that is a product can successfully lead us to form a certain lifestyle, it proves that the designer of this product has stroke a balance among usefulness, possibility of using and willingness to use [21].

This research take “WeChat” as a classic example by using literature researching method, interviews and questionnaire to explore the specific design methods of WeChat on four elements of lifestyle. The research has interviewed 25 WeChat users. The content is considered from the following three aspects: What problems does WeChat as a tool solve in daily life and how to solve them? How WeChat as a creative product affect lifestyle through good design and user experience? What changes does WeChat bring to its users? Author has concluded all 25 pieces of questionnaire and classified and analyzed them centering on four core problems: the motivation to use WeChat, the reason for continued use, the changes of lifestyle because of WeChat and the meaning brought by it. Finally, we concluded the influence of WeChat on lifestyle as following part (see Fig. 4): 1. It changes behaviors such as socialize, work and payment through combining all sorts of services. 2. helps it users to establish and develop a new social network and becomes an important tool to maintain daily relationship. 3. It changes the rhythm of life and has effects on life efficiency and emotion. 4. Users have gained a new life meaning through using WeChat.

Fig. 4.
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The conclusion of elements for participants to use WeChat.

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It is easy to see this research has proved the four elements of lifestyle by WeChat through studying people’s specific behaviors and situations for using WeChat. WeChat, through providing integrated life services has changed people’s behaviors and life pace. Thus, it can help people to build new relationship between people and people as well as people and business, also bring new meaning to people.

5 Conclusion

The age of experience economy brings many changes to people’s life, and it also raises some new requirement to designers. This thesis studies at the lifestyle, using questionnaire and interviews, rearranging the elements of lifestyle: motivation, rhythm, relationship and meaning. Meaning is the core of all elements, and no natter behaviors, relationship or rhythm are motivated and guided by meaning. The changes of behaviors are always accompanied by the changes of relationship and rhythm. The changes of relationship will affect people’s behaviors and rhythm. And the changes of rhythm are coupled with changes in behaviors, relationship and meaning. In a nutshell, behaviors, rhythm, relationship and meaning can be influencing factors of the formation and changes of lifestyle, at the same time, they can be the objects of design.