Designing happiness: projects that just want to make you happy

Playgrounds are the apotheosis of pure and ever-changing happiness, melting into a single magma newfound complicity with playmates and the body’s momentum toward new postures and new limits. In France, between the Glorious Thirties and ‘68, Group Ludic was formed under the impetus of a fashion designer and stylist, an architect, and an artist – David Roditi, Simon Koszel, and Xavier De La Salle, respectively. Their goal? To spread a culture of play capable of transcending the swing-slide-sandbox triad. The trio would create some 150 installations worldwide, ranging from holiday villages to grands ensembles. As a sort of lowest common denominator, the roundness of the sphere would become the way to give life to a possible narrative of play, capable of nurturing stories and hiding places precisely in the articulation between its modules. One of the reasons behind Group Ludic’s break-up in 1992 was the tightening of safety regulations, which encouraged a return to classic playground games.

Yet another chair? Spun is the exception that proves the rule. A breath of fresh air since its release in 2010, Spun eliminates static and composed postures. But it is not just the movement induced by its top shape that makes the difference. Spun is a calculated invitation to lose control, which happens when the chair spins and your head goes backwards and your feet go up. Spun is also an indirect invitation to step out of your comfort zone and experience once again the sense of freedom and abandonment that movement brings.

Is embracing kitsch a gateway to happiness? And can you dream better dreams if the images conveyed by the bed are explicitly pop, bold, totemic, and animated by a strong symbolic bearing? This is the hope of the celebrated series of four beds designed by Archizoom Associati. These beds, which defy fixed proportions and metrics and, with them, bourgeois taste, are at the very least an invitation to embrace a great libertarian impulse, to be pursued with one’s eyes closed as well as in the daily routine of one’s domestic space.

If sexual pleasure is one of the most obvious forms of happiness, sex toys are now a popular tool for accelerating its intensity. Design has been eager to contribute to this relatively new category of objects, searching for more ergonomic and less conventional approaches to enhancing this ephemeral ecstasy. Let’s take a look at a few examples. Light years away from the somewhat glossy and oversized vulgarity of many sex toys, Form 3 enhances the effect of touch by applying pressure to a silicone membrane. 

Vesper, on the other hand, is a jewel toy: worn around the neck like a poised claim, it also performs nonchalantly thanks to its distinct minimalism. 

HelloTouch, a vibrator that attaches to the wrist and connects the fingertips to vibrating supports, is designed to sensitize the tactile perception of the entire body.

Among contemporary designers, Stefan Sagmeister is perhaps the one who has experimented the most, with an almost scientific approach to finding happiness. Using design as a tool to shape his biography and experiences, the Austrian graphic designer devoted one of his sabbatical years to testing what made him happy – meditation, love, drugs? – and measuring what worked best. The result was shared through a unique exhibition, “The Happy Show” – a translation of the concept of happiness into apt visual metaphors and an invitation for each of us to exercise our happiness muscle.

Regarded as the first slaughterhouse designer, Temple Grandin conceived the squeeze machine – also known as the hug machine – to bring relief to the sensory overload brought about by her autism. A fine connoisseur of animal psychology, Grandin had in fact noticed that cows calm down when placed in a squeeze chute, a structure that compresses their bodies. Lucy McRae’s work is inspired by the same principle but updates the context. Thinking of an increasingly digital world where tactile interaction between people is becoming more rare, her Compression Cradle compensates for the lack of physical contact by regenerating the physical benefits that happen through contact between individuals, chief among them the production of oxytocin, the hormone responsible for building trust and connection. Compression Cradle was exhibited in 2019 at the International Triennial Exhibition in the Dutch Pavilion.

In recent years, British-Nigerian Yinka Ilori has built a reputation for his vibrant and instinctive approach to color, seamlessly applied to furniture, interiors, photographs, and installations. He is a master of the virtuous relationship that exists between color and happiness. The exhibition “Parables of Happiness”, recently held at the Design Museum in London, restores his poetics in a vast kaleidoscope of color, while also testifying to the cultural vibrancy of contemporary London’s mix of identities. Equally celebrated are his urban interventions and tactical urbanism, including 2019’s Happy Street, which demonstrate how the positivity of color serves as a collective binder and symbol of redemption for neglected and forgotten places.

Many aspects of our lives have been turned into data sets for the use of indices and statistics. Happiness tracking, however, escapes this quantitative identification, according to the Hedonometer team. To fill this gap, the Hedonometer project has developed an algorithm that pulls data from where people most express their feelings: social networks. Its interface translates how people report feeling into a timeline – a way not only to capture collective mood trends, but also to record how specific events affect our emotions. Hedonometer’s research has in turn become a data set for other artistic interventions, such as those by visual designer Giuseppe Lo Schiavo.