Happy By Design

Can good design truly make us happier? Given that we spend over 80% of our time in buildings, shouldn't we have a better understanding of how they make us feel? Happy by Design explores the ways in which buildings, spaces and cities affect our moods. It reveals how architecture and design can make us happy and support mental health, and explains how poor design can have the opposite effect. Presented through a series of easy-to-understand design tips and accompanied by beautiful diagrams and illustrations, Happy by Design is a fantastic resource for architects, designers and students, or for anybody who would like to better understand the relationship between buildings and happiness. With the pandemic and cost-of-living crisis, the importance of designing for mental wellbeing has never been higher on the agenda. Whether through low-energy design, designing in better ventilation to avoid passing on pathogens or the realisation of the importance of accessing nature within an environment, this revised edition has been updated to reflect a changed world.

Happy by Design teaches us how we can actively improve our health and wellbeing through the way we design our living spaces. From the paint colour that's been named the happiest, to the science of getting a good night's sleep, Happy by Design offers bite-sized and affordable design ideas that are accessible to all, from a young renter in an urban apartment to a busy family in their own home. By quizzing experts from NASA scientists to colour gurus, Victoria Harrison has devised a Happy Home Programme to help everyone transform their living spaces and put wellbeing at the heart of their homes. With fun and easy ideas for each room in the home, the programme is easy to follow and packed with tips and inspiration to help everyone live the happiest life possible.

This is not just another happiness book. In Happiness by Design, happiness and behavior expert Paul Dolan combines the latest insights from economics and psychology to illustrate that in order to be happy we must behave happy Our happiness is experiences of both pleasure and purpose over time and it depends on what we actually pay attention to. Using what Dolan calls deciding, designing, and doing, we can overcome the biases that make us miserable and redesign our environments to make it easier to experience happiness, fulfilment, and even health. With uncanny wit and keen perception, Dolan reveals what we can do to find our unique optimal balance of pleasure and purpose, offering practical advice on how to organize our lives in happiness-promoting ways and fresh insights into how we feel, including why: • Having kids reduces pleasure but gives us a massive dose of purpose • Gaining weight won’t necessarily make us unhappier, but being too ambitious might • A quiet neighborhood is more important than a big house Vividly rendering intriguing research and lively anecdotal evidence, Happiness by Design offers an absorbing, thought-provoking, new paradigm for readers of Stumbling on Happiness and The How of Happiness.

If you were to design a building that prioritises occupants’ happiness, what would it look like? How would the materials, form and layout support healthy ways of living and working? Delving into the evidenced-based research on architecture and mental wellbeing, The Happy Design Toolkit helps you to create happier places. It explores how factors, such as lighting, comfort, control over our environments and access to nature, exercise and social interaction, can impact how we feel. Easy-to-understand tips include bringing nature into your developments with roof gardens and living facades and countering social isolation with communal areas that encourage chance interaction. Each of the featured architectural interventions includes an analysis of the wellbeing benefits as well as the potential limitations or associated challenges. From sparking joy in individual homes and workplaces to encouraging healthier lifestyles through landscaping and urban design, this book demonstrates how wellbeing concepts can be integrated across a range of scales and typologies. Packed with inspiration and advice, The Happy Design Toolkit will breathe new life into your projects and help you create a happier and more inclusive built environment for everyone. Features real-world examples including Marmalade Lane co-housing by Mole Architects, Francis Holland School by BDP, Maggie’s Centre Oldham by dRMM Architects, Kings Crescent Estate by Karakusevic Carson Architects and Happy Street by Yinka Ilori. Over 100 hand-drawn illustrations of design details and elevations. Essential reading for architects, interior designers, landscape architects and students.

As a Professor of Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics, Dolan conducts original research into the measurement of happiness and its causes and consequences, including the effects of our behaviour. Here he creates a new outlook on the pursuit of happiness - it's not just how you feel, it's how you act. Happiness by Design shows that being happier requires us to actively re-design our immediate environment. Enough has been written on how to think happy. Happiness by Design is about how to behave happy and how to incorporate the most recent research findings into our everyday lives.

Charles Montgomery’s Happy City will revolutionize the way we think about urban life. After decades of unchecked sprawl, more people than ever are moving back to the city. Dense urban living has been prescribed as a panacea for the environmental and resource crises of our time. But is it better or worse for our happiness? Are subways, sidewalks and condo towers an improvement on the car-dependence of sprawl? The award-winning journalist Charles Montgomery finds answers to such questions at the intersection between urban design and the emerging science of happiness, during an exhilarating journey through some of the world’s most dynamic cities. He meets the visionary mayor who introduced a “sexy” bus to ease status anxiety in Bogotá; the architect who brought the lessons of medieval Tuscan hill towns to modern-day New York City; the activist who turned Paris’s urban freeways into beaches; and an army of American suburbanites who have hacked the design of their own streets and neighborhoods. Rich with new insights from psychology, neuroscience and Montgomery’s own urban experiments, Happy City reveals how our cities can shape our thoughts as well as our behavior. The message is as surprising as it is hopeful: by retrofitting cities and our own lives for happiness, we can tackle the urgent challenges of our age. The happy city can save the world--and all of us can help build it.

Amanda Talbot demonstrates how architecture and interior design at their best can make us safer, healthier, more efficient, enlightened and productive - all contributing to a fundamental sense of wellbeing. In essence, Happy shows us ways in which design can help us live a happy life. This global survey reveals how designers are creating joyous living spaces that play to our emotions, speaking to our hearts as much as to our heads, through strategic planning and execution and by using carefully chosen colours, textures, quality of materials and finishes. Chapters (which incorporate case studies from homes around the world, as well as styled images) include 'Colour', 'Communal', 'Down time', 'Edit', 'Flow', 'Humour', 'Light', 'Location', 'Memories', 'Nature', 'Order', 'Play', 'Senses' and 'Spontaneity'.

Happy by Design teaches us how we can actively improve our health and wellbeing through the way we design our living spaces. From the paint colour that's been named the happiest, to the science of getting a good night's sleep, Happy by Design offers bite-sized and affordable design ideas that are accessible to all, from a young renter in an urban apartment to a busy family in their own home. By quizzing experts from NASA scientists to colour gurus, Victoria Harrison has devised a Happy Home Programme to help everyone transform their living spaces and put wellbeing at the heart of their homes. With fun and easy ideas for each room in the home, the programme is easy to follow and packed with tips and inspiration to help everyone live the happiest life possible.