Real-time happiness data launched for the UK

When my colleague Nic Marks, Founder of nef’s centre for well-being, talks about ways that society could better promote well-being for its citizens, one of the things he often points to is the role that could be played by real time well-being data. The idea is that rather than nightly news reports being rounded off with updates on movements in the FTSE 100 and global currency markets – practically unintelligible to many of us – we should instead hear about national levels of well-being measured that day. It’s a piece of systems theory thinking – based on the idea that we need information to create timely feedback loops from which society can learn and evolve.

A key obstacle in the path of this idea is the practical difficulty of undertaking this daily measurement. But researchers at the London School of Economics Department of Geography & Environment have just launched a website which does in fact display real-time happiness data from people in the UK. Linked to their free mappiness iPhone app, the www.mappiness.org.uk website displays ‘hedonimeters’ showing levels of happiness currently being reported by app users, as well as a map showing the outdoor locations where people have reported being happy.

The app uses a form of the Experience Sampling Method, the type of well-being measurement advocated by big names in the well-being research field such as Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman. Alerts are sent to users’ phones at random times during the day, asking them to rate how happy, relaxed and awake they’re currently feeling, and to provide brief information about what they’re doing at the time. Having downloaded the app a few days ago I can report that responding is more fun and less onerous than it might sound – and the personal stats it generates provides a really interesting insight in to when and how my mood has been changing.

The resulting public hedonimeter data is currently a fairly limited snapshot of well-being in the UK. It focuses on the happiness component of well-being and not the other aspects of how people are doing, for example, how capable, autonomous and connected they feel to others. And it obviously only collects data from iPhone owners who have volunteered to use the app. But it points to some very interesting future possibilities for those of us who advocate the importance of paying at least as much attention to how people are experiencing their lives as to how the pound is doing against the dollar.