A key part of the course is the Designing Happiness App, an iOS application that allows students to take photos of happiness moments. These moments become a living data set that is used for several course assignments while also serving as a resource for developing insights around what drives happiness.

Contribution of photos through the app is an important part of a student's grade for the course. The photos you see here currently are happiness moments captured by the DH teaching team.

Course Application due March 1 at Midnight

What we think drives our happiness often doesn’t. So what does? And how can knowing this help us create strong companies and brands?

Understanding happiness is crucial to building successful relationships, products, and organizations. Yet recent research suggests that our definition of happiness is often confused and misguided. In this class, we explore new data on happiness, focusing on:

• re-thinking happiness (a happy you)
• designing happiness (a happy company)
• spreading happiness (a happy brand)

Students will work together to use an iterative design-thinking approach to understand our own definitions of happiness, uncover what really makes us happy (vs. what we think makes us happy), prototype solutions/products to increase our happiness, and design happy companies and brands. The class will be data-driven, drawing on multiple methodologies both quantitative and ethnographic. Throughout the quarter, students will build a class-wide database to investigate real-world happiness data via an Designing Happiness app, and test hypotheses about what truly makes them, their teams and their customers happy. This class is recommended for students who plan to be a future entrepreneur building a strong brand, an employee who finds meaning in their work, or someone who wants to understand happiness.