Design your happiness today
We are Masamichi Souzou (正道想像), meaning "Correct Path, Imagined/Created" in Japanese. We are a company looking to optimize the world’s happiness. We build products and services that support individuals to make changes that will improve their happiness, and to help organizations and governments to put in place supports that will improve the happiness of their employees, partners, customers, and citizens.
We consider everything. Everything in the world is connected together in very complex ways, and nothing falls outside of our purview
We seek the greatest number of people to experience the greatest possible happiness over the longest period of time
We look to understand and take responsibility for the TOTAL impact of all of our actions in the world, no matter the degrees of separation
J. Paul is a designer & researcher based in London with expertise in service design & speculative design, and extensive healthcare experience. He has worked at the Mayo Clinic in the Center for Innovation on patient experience and care delivery models, and teaches at the Royal College of Art in London on Service Design. He has been actively exploring approaches for the optimization of happiness for the past 10 years.
Elliott is a strategist & designer working in Richmond, Virginia and San Jose, Costa Rica. He has degrees in Sociology and Health Administration, and a variety of experiences working in health and across healthcare organizations such as Cleveland Clinic. Elliott is intensely interested in how technology is changing the way we design services and products for health and happiness.
Nuzi is an experienced healthcare UX designer and product strategist based in Los Angeles, and holds an MRes in Healthcare & Design at the Royal College of Art (Imperial College + Helix Center). Nuzi guides us on product development going forward.
In a world where everything is connected, there is no system, activity, or interaction that falls outside our purview. And through the appropriate consideration of every part of this beautifully complex world we work to optimize for human happiness.
We believe that the ultimate design intent is happiness. It doesn’t matter what we are trying to do in life, better relationships, better job, get fit, eat better, more money, bigger, better, faster, slower, stronger, smarter, etc… we undertake these efforts because we believe that achieving them will help us to be happier.
Happiness is a very complex experience, with many facets. We start with the idea that much of happiness is actually an evolved chemical sensation that lets us know when we are doing things right in terms of survival.
Unfortunately much of the world is not designed to support happiness, and is actually antithetical to its achievement. The world is either haphazard and unconsidered, or companies have designed things in a way to optimize for profit often at the expense of our happiness. Current business & design practices optimize for profit and fail to consider the larger cumulative impact of these activities over time, which inevitably lead to catastrophic collapse of systems, like the obesity epidemic, global financial instability, and climate change.
But what if things were different? What if we designed the world for happiness?
Our Happiness Development fund allows you to donate directly to activities working to improve the world's happiness.
Your donation support efforts to further develop approaches for happiness optimization, at the personal, organizational, and civic levels. Your support funds a global wave of work looking to explore, understand, and create a world that better supports human happiness. This donation to the Happiness Development Fund helps place Masamichi Souzou in a position to deploy new methodologies, products, and services that create new value and directly increase the world’s happiness.
Find a donation level that is comfortable for your current financial situation and does not interfere with your basic needs. If you earn less than $90,000 a year, we suggest donating no more than $100 dollars per year or $10/month to the HDF.
You'll receive a certificate of donation, be mentioned on our donor list (Anonymously if you prefer), and be kept up-to-date on our work and progress and future opportunities ahead.
*This is a donation with no tax benefits for the donor, as MMSZ is not a charity. (We purposely do this to avoid taking tax revenue away from democratic programs and services that may support critical basic civic infrastructure and life.)
