Our stories
Teaching happiness for tomorrow’s innovation.
OCT 1, 2019
I have always lived in big cities, chasing after my professional and personal goals. A year ago, I started a worldwide research about happiness. I took advantage of my holiday break travels to Japan and Ivory Coast to start collecting insights on people’s happiness.
Happiness is about understanding yourself
Thanks to this, I understood that no matter the age, the gender, and the origin, we all have the same universal needs and search for similar things in life. I realised that happiness is about understanding yourself; what you already have, and what you truly desire. The sooner you fulfill your deepest needs, the better your life will be.
How can we help young people be happier?
Back from my travels with a little group of design enthusiasts we decided to take action in Barcelona. We challenged the UX-UI master students at ESDi as part of their Design Thinking Experience_Lab module. Design thinking is a process of innovation — a 5 steps method that empowers anyone to solve complex problems. It involves understanding human needs, re-framing the problem in human-centric ways, creating ideas, prototyping, and testing. (For more on design thinking, click here.)
From April to June, 9 students passed through these 5 steps in the context of our happiness challenge, targeting a group of 18 to 33 year olds. As happiness is a very holistic topic, the students were split into 3 groups to focus more on the specific areas of their choice: happiness at work, happiness at school, happiness in love.
The design thinking exercise went really well in: the insights found were highly inspiring, and the final prototypes very creative and professionally built.
“When we took the love topic we thought it will be so boring. But then, little by little, we discovered that love was not about good communication. It is all about developing yourself, and following your dreams first!” they said.
“At the end of the day, money is not what makes people happy at work. What you need before all is a good relationship with our colleagues, and a sense of freedom”.
“When studying, people feel so pressured and so lonely. We all have our own problems to tackle, in the end”.
We all search for similar things in life
Listening to these students made me realize that no matter how old we are, what really drives us to accomplishment is qualitative self knowledge, and real relationships.
The future of innovation lies in empathy
But to me, the real success of this class lives in the empathy these 9 students developed to discover other people’s real needs. Through observation, interviews, tons of curiosity (and post-its!) they had the opportunity to understand the depth of anyone’s needs and fears.
To the class: thank you for your smiles and your eyes full of light and passion when you presented your findings and your prototypes. You opened both hearts and minds to push your thinking forward; we could see you and your projects growing in such an obvious and fast way!
Maybe that’s what innovation is about: staying connected with and open to others, in order to keep in touch with what truly matters.
Creating unique moments!
APR 3, 2019
Enthusiasm is contagious. So much that, in a very spontaneous way, a team of Happiness Shakers was born.
Our mission? Bring to light these Happiness Insights through customized experiences, so people can stop their modern super-active lives for a moment and return to the essence.
How? By creating events where they can connect with their emotions by playing. Our first event took place on a Friday, January 2019 in Ironhack, Barcelona. 3 Happiness Shakers, 25 designers as participants and some tons of curiosity to share.
Happiness is a serious but fragile subject, difficult to catch.
As we really wanted to design a gaming event we decided to split the experience into 2 parts:
1. Stimulating ideas before the event: During 15 days we asked the participants regularly and privately to think on some topics of their lives (such as: today I invite you to think about a moment in your life when you felt really free, etc…). Our objective was to warm them up and to let them process the information, at their own pace. For creating these questions, we took the most outstanding insights from the Research previously done when travelling.
2. Stimulating emotions during the event: For the event we created a happiness star that summarizes the 5 ways people usually experience happiness (check previous article), and we made them go through it, alternating short games and activities related to each point of the star. From keeping balloons in the air to creating time capsules and capturing treasures in the city: we gave them the opportunity to individually position themselves in their own happiness quest.
More than a happy event, it has been an explosion … 3h00 shared between laughs and shouts, non-stop. We thought we would bring happiness that night. Yes we did. And we found ourselves receiving it as well.
This feeling of being in the right place, at the right time.
That is, what is happening in front of me is taking a full meaning. Now. With them. With ourselves. Because for us happiness is like this: giving without counting. And receiving, whenever you least expect it, but 25 times bigger. It is a shared moment.
How to tease happiness? Creating unique moments!
Globally, people feel happy when they are aware of living one of these 5 states…
MARCH 6, 2019
In the last article we talked about Happiness . It is to look inside your feelings and value what you are living in that precise moment. But… how do you do that?
The hardest is always the beginning. Some trends appeared.
These 5 states are not pyramidal, and each person can experience one or several at a time. Its depends on the person, its context, its priorities and its horizon.
People usually feel happy when they become aware that they are currently:
- covering what they consider to be their basic needs (they feel safe);
- building their personal freedom (they can move wherever they want);
- experimenting new things (they learn more about themselves);
- frequently doing things that make them feel good (they connect more and more with themselves);
- feeling fulfilled (they connect with the world around them).
And you? what do you need to be happy? :)
Please note: it is just my particular observation. Feel free to apply it to your own experiences… if applicable!
We are all looking for Happiness, after all. But… what does it mean to be happy?
FEB 25, 2019
Is there a way we can make people see happiness? Leading this Research made me travel around the world… interviewing people.
It all started last summer, a need to disconnect. I am passionate about User Experience, but I was feeling a call to connect with the Human being that is behind the screen. So I took my backpack, a notebook, some pens and a flight ticket. Destination? Tokyo, where I decided to stop random people on the street asking them:
What is it that makes you happy? When did you feel happy for the last time? Could you write it to me?
Ok let’s go. Worst case scenario: they ignore me! The first stranger I talked to was Dan, around 40 years old, in a café. Something interesting happened. After answering to my question, I noticed a sincere smile on his face. In the doubt, I repeated the experience. After Japan I went to Spain, France and Ivory Coast. Everywhere, the same smile was there!
The simple fact of asking the question already brings happiness to people. More than the excitement of participating in something, my question makes them put themselves in their own life.
We are all looking for happiness, but what if happiness was an attitude?
Listen to the self: stop judging, comparing, analyzing. Instead: paying attention to our feelings and emotions, so we can understand what we really are.