Business Process Management and design have been mainly concerned with transactional efficiency and effectiveness of workflows reflecting its grounding in scientific management, engineering and computer science. Affective, human-centered design goals have been largely absent, making BPM an under-designed discipline constrained in its ambition and limited in its impact. Addressing this shortfall and motivating a new research agenda, this paper proposes ‘affective business process design’ to explicitly consider how human actors experience emotions, feelings and moods during process interactions. Making affect a primary concern of business process design counterbalances the established, rational and analytical focus of this stage in the process lifecycle. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, we conceptualize affective business process design and outline its foundations and premises. Second, we discuss process design options to realize affective business processes. We conclude by outlining future research avenues to advance, operationalize and integrate the broader agenda of ‘affective BPM’.