The Unhappiness Repairer: A Pop-Up Psychotherapy Office
The Unhappiness Repairer is a pop-up psychotherapy stand that addresses people’s problems within their tangible contexts and uses design to solve them. It was made by Silvia Neretti as her master thesis work and showcased at this year’s Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven.
People have never given happiness so much attention as they are giving it nowadays. It’s everywhere, we constantly engage in conversations about it, there are hundreds of books being published on this topic each year and there seems to be going on this great hunt for the formula of true, 100% happiness among the authors, all fighting for the recognition of THE ONE that led all the miserable people of this world into the Nirvana, a place of perfect peace and joy.
Designer Silvia Neretti has approached happiness from another angle. With her pop-up stand she explores the relationship between happiness, psychotherapy and design, questioning if it’s possible to design happiness?
For Neretti, the only way to be happy, is to be completely independent from the context she’s in and that clue led her to design the pop-up therapy stand that uses design as a method to rebuild the self. If your problem is distraction she will make a cardboard modification to treat that problem, and she will do the same with feelings of abandonment, boredom, and so on.
While this stand may not completely replace a traditional form of psychotherapy, it most certainly makes us think about space and about the effect it has on our mood. Maybe designing happiness is not that impossible after all.
