Happiness talks

Happiness in design is about how products and working environments affect people’s wellbeing. That can mean the moment of pleasure when something works beautifully, the deeper satisfaction of getting absorbed in a task, or whether a product leaves people better or worse off over time.

It is a useful lens for UX and product work because it widens the question from “can people use this?” to “is this good for them?”. Research on flow and positive psychology gives designers a vocabulary for this, and the same thinking applies to the teams who make products.

The four talks here span 2008 to 2019. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi presents “Flow, the secret to happiness” at TED (2008), and Stefan Sagmeister gives “Design and Happiness”. Jason Fried talks about managing for productivity and happiness at The Next Web Conference (2016), and Johannes Ippen asks why UX is a problem in “Humans, not Users” (TED Talks, 2019).