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

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 seminar will be data-driven, drawing on multiple methodologies including blogs, surveys, and experiments. Throughout the quarter, students will build a class-wide database to investigate real-world happiness data and test hypotheses about what truly makes us and our teams 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.