The project started as a systemic design research on how work and welfare are changing rapidly because of politics, technology, and economics, and how the impact of the pandemic has accelerated this process of evolution.

In the future, the quest for purpose in work and the satisfaction of non-material needs is going to be more relevant to people, and welfare institutions should play a massive role on this.

The objective of this project was to explore how in a prospective scenario, the Norwegian welfare institution (NAV), could help people achieve a more complete wellbeing, satisfying material needs as it do now, as well as non-material needs.

To create a design conversation about these scenarios, two prototypes of digital services were developed. The first one, tries constantly to collect information about the general well being of the person that uses NAV services. To achieve this, a set of short questions related to topics like mental wellbeing and motivation, are asked every time the person wants to access the digital services of NAV. It is planned that NAV services are going to be centralized in one platform, in which a questionnaire like these can be included to collect this information. The main goal of gathering this information is enabling the institution to track possible problems in the wellbeing of the person. The chance to have this constant monitoring allows the institution to prevent instead of reacting.

Purpose is a key concept for the idea of complete wellbeing. If people are happy doing what they do in their lives, the welfare state becomes stronger. Though purpose is a personal answer of every individual, welfare institutions can help people to achieve it in different ways, being motivation one of them.

In institutions like NAV, long processes like finding a job rely much on keeping motivation, that is why the second service goal is to try to help in this task. The service uses gamification elements to create a visual feedback for the activities the person does. An avatar is created by the person, which is fed by a system of points, in which the person uploads all the activities done daily and depending on the activity, the system and the user grant a certain score to each task. The more points the user gets, the happier the avatar will be, less points equal a sad avatar. The points system work as a visual reward that to remind people of the impact of each task they do in their lives. It is expected that the emotional feedback given by the avatar to the user will help to sustain the motivation to reach the desired final goal.