IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Winter 2013 - 19

RAFAEL A. CALVO
AND DORIAN
PETERS

OPINION

Promoting Psychological
Wellbeing: Loftier Goals
for New Technologies

on't be evil" wrote Larry Page and Sergey
Brin on the eve of Google's initial public
offering (IPO) in 2004. As a statement of
the company's mission, the phrase resonated then, as it does now, with technology designers
and developers who want to believe that the work they
love to do is also improving the world. The drive to "do
good with technology" is not new, but our definitions of
what "good" is and how to achieve it have been undergoing some significant changes.
For a long time, "good" in the technology industry has
been bound up with more easily quantifiable things like
productivity, computing power, security, novelty, portability, or reduced cost. These are all valid drivers for invention, and they've taken us a long way. But we suggest that
these are really proxies to a greater overall goal: happiness.
The unspoken assumption is that when we have greater
productivity, security, or convenience, life is better and we
are happier. So what if we were to address the issue of
using technology to increase happiness more directly?
Arguably, the pursuit of happiness - or what psychologists refer to with greater precision as "psychological wellbeing" - drives everything we do. But this
pursuit is often indirect. wealth has been the most
commonly used proxy for psychological wellbeing. It
often seems safe to assume that if people get richer,
they get happier, so governments and businesses work
to build systems that generate greater wealth and measure success accordingly. But economists themselves
have shown that the link between wealth and wellbeing is weaker than we'd like to think, and that beyond
the satisfaction of modest needs, more wealth doesn't
make a society significantly happier [1].
Similarly, we frequently assume that technological progress will inherently improve our lives and
increase our happiness. Technological advancement
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2013.2286429
Date of publication: 9 December 2013

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

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Powermat Power 2.0 Ecosystem illustration of wireless
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cloud, which enables to manage access to power in
public places for the benefit of customers and venues.

can increase wealth and improve health and longevity, therefore happiness. The nagging question remains
however, that if in the last 30 years computers have
come to permeate most of our waking moments, why
aren't we experiencing unprecedented levels of psychological wellbeing?
Of course, there could be a homeostasis inherent to
the human condition that one can never hope to surpass,
or perhaps there are negative variables counterbalancing the positive effects of technology. Yet we can't help
but suspect that technology can do better at improving
our wellbeing than it has, and if it hasn't to date, that
shouldn't come as a surprise because we haven't actually included the support of wellbeing into the design
of our technology.
with advancements in big data and ubiquitous computing at our disposal [2], we think that it is the ideal
moment to start measuring and designing for the impact
of technologies on the psychological wellbeing of the
people who use them. we have come to refer to efforts
in this area as "positive computing." The term "positive
computing" was originally suggested hypothetically by
Tomas Sander in a 2011 book for psychologists [3]. we
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Winter 2013