The Challenge | Our client was building a city, and our job was to make it happy.

Our client was building a city in Japan designed to weave together layers of urban life in a way that optimizes human movement and experience. But they wanted to go a step further: they wanted the city itself to make people happier.

My team was hired to help them identify behaviors that would facilitate happiness, and design aspects of the built environment that would encourage them.

Approach | We synthesized insights on human-environment interaction.

As the lead designer for our intervention toolkit, it was my job to ensure we were experts on the intersection of behavioral science, urban design, and subjective wellbeing (happiness). Primary research was not an option, so I designed a four step process to gather insights:

1. Insights from previous research: Though primary research was not in scope, we were able to use insights from previous research the client had conducted with Japanese people and families interested in living in the city.
2. Rapid literature review: I lead my team in a rapid, multidisciplinary search of research that could strengthen the evidence basis of our designs. We pulled from behavioral science, sociology, anthropology, urban planning, and other fields.
3. Expert interviews: Not wanting lack of subject matter expertise to cultivate blind spots, I coordinated with two leading experts on wellbeing and the build environment to pressure test our work.
4. Cultural co-design: As a non-Japanese team providing recommendations for a city in Japan, I wanted to ensure that our understanding of the challenge and proposed interventions were culturally grounded. We hired a Japanese behavioral science consultant, with whom I worked closely throughout.

Identifying target behaviors for happiness.

Our knowledge gathering yielded a huge volume of insights. I organized these into three key pillars— fostering social connections, nature interaction, and safety and security— and identified 12 key target behaviors across the pillars (1-4 shown below).

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Design | I led the creation of a toolkit of intervention concepts.

Knowing that the city would continue being designed and constructed for years to come, I opted to cast the net wide and designed lots of intervention ideas that could enable future users to find ideas for specific aspects of or challenges within the city. However, we also prioritized a smaller handful of ideas based on potential impact. I organized our recommendations into two categories:

1. Intervention Concepts: The toolkit included over 80 intervention concepts for ways to build subjective wellbeing into the city's infrastructure— everything from converting cortisol-inducing surfaces (e.g., large, flat, uninterrupted walls) to digital natural imagery, to designing tabletops in parks and cafes with features that would nudge social interactions.
2. Cross-cutting tools: The toolkit included several recommendations that could affect a large number of recommendations— for example, designing parts of the city with gait recognition technology that would enable a variety of personalized interventions.

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Next steps

The next step for the client was to select a small number of ideas to test in a digital twin of the city— a virtual reality simulation. I worked with my team to help them hammer out the intervention details and design the trial protocol, ultimately leaving them with a toolkit and trial design that they would be able to implement independently.

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