Designing Happiness

The lesson will be composed of two parts: in the first part, you will learn about the basics of happiness science: what we know about what makes us happy (and what doesn’t) and what are the implications of being happy from a personal, social, and economical perspective.

In the second part we will learn how to design solutions: we will get to work and, using design thinking method, we will invent, create and prototype our first ideas to help people be a little bit happier.

During the day we will go “on the field” and ask people what makes them happy, as well as begin to validate our ideas with “real” users.

Part I. Designing Applications that matter

Slides on empathy-driven design
Intro to design thinking.
Mixtapes: Understand, Ideate, Experiment
The Gift Giving experience (video, material)
Fill out the Gift Giving Debrief Form
Rapid prototyping with invisionapp
The business model canvas, with a template and example

Useful additional material

Creative confidence, by IDEO.
Resonate, a fantastic book on how to prepare talks
Presentation zen design, another great book on how to make your presentation elegant and compelling
People buy why you do things, not what you do. TED talk, very easy and pleasant listening.
The puzzle of motivation. Another TED talk. Informative and fun.
Body language. Fascinating. Here.
Example of engineer-driven design from the big bang theory.
Example of empathy-driven design: the IDEO shopping cart (1999).
More on the IDEO design process from cbs.
Follow the Udacity course on building startups.
- GREAT book, fun, easy: Gear up!