A key part of the course is the Designing (for) Happiness App, an iOS application that allows students to take photos of happiness moments. These moments are a living data set to serve as a resource for developing insights around what drives happiness.

Research has revealed surprising and counter-intuitive forces behind customer and employee happiness, forces that have a direct impact on the success of products and brands. From this work fall three tenets:

1. Strong brands are created, in equal parts, by fueling employees with passion and by engaging loyal customers.
2. Employees want to be valued members of a high performing team on an inspired mission.
3. Strong brands improve the lives of customers -- helping them achieve their goals, shape their stories, and cultivate their happiness.

In this class, we will rethink how to design products and improve brands. In multidisciplinary teams, we combine design thinking with social psychological frameworks to prototype products and build brands in a quarter-long project. Designing (for) Happiness will use an iPhone/web app called StoryBank, which gathers moments that users have collected on Instagram and helps analysts sort through these datapoints to find specific, meaningful insights about brands. For the final project, students use an iterative design-thinking process to uncover what factors actually make customers and employees happy (instead of what we think makes them happy). Designing (for) Happiness attracts many types of students, from technologists and engineers to business leaders and entrepreneurs. Above all, this class is meant for people who want to build innovative products and valuable brands that have positive, meaningful, lasting impact.