Lauren Bunker- The Happy Show

Stefan Sagmeister's The Happy Show is a presentation of a dissection of the concept of happiness, what it means to be happy and how happiness is attained.

Before entering the exhibit I was curious as to what the Designer had concluded and what he would show the audience. I thought that it would be very difficult to pin down the root of something that seems so personal. I didn't expect the exhibit to be the result of such extensive research.

I had expected to see personal representations of the designer's happiness but Sagmeister didn't create the exhibition based solely on his own thoughts. Instead of the expected representations of the feeling of happiness or pieces meant to elicit happiness from the viewer I saw many infographics and references to psychologists and philosophers. My eyes were opened to the amount of reading and questioning that took place in order to visually address the topic of happiness.

Sagmeister's handwritten narration of the exhibition relates to the class reading on how to define problems.

The use of brainstorming, "attacking a problem from many directions at once" (Lupton, p. 16), to define and question happiness goes along most with what I had expected to see. I imagined Sagmeister sitting alone thinking about things that had to do with his happiness, doodling whatever popped into his head and then translating those ideas into the final pieces. This may have been one step of his process, but definitely not the only.

It is obvious that the designer went a lot further than the confines of his own mind when considering the concept of happiness.

In the Happiness Around The World infographic Sagmeister notes travels to places around the world and what levels of happiness he perceived- a technique that would be related to the reading's explanation of interviewing as an information source. The text notes that "people aren't always good at verbally articulating what they want, but they can show it in their body language" (Lupton, p. 26). Observing the people of the places he visited brings a wider dimension to the question.

My ending thought of the exhibit is that it can be seen as one big mind map with happiness at the center. Our text says that a mind map "starts with a central term or idea, the designer quickly plots out associated images and concepts" (Lupton, p. 22). Though more than a quick attack and solution, I see all of the different pieces and considerations as the branches of a mind map; achieving happiness through fulfilling basic needs, how relationships and jobs make you feel, what factor money or drugs have.