The Pudding is one of those sites I love to browse regularly and always leave with a feeling of delight (and new insights).
If you haven’t heard of them, they are a digital publication that creates data-driven stories. So they often have an interesting dataset or pose a curious question (often both) and turn it into a visual essay for readers to explore.
One piece I found yesterday and wanted to share is called “Happy Map” by Alvin Chang.
The idea is pretty simple:
The whole project is based on a 2017 research project where 10’000 people across the globe were tasked with tracking their happy moments. This resulted in a dataset of more than 100’000 of them.
Alvin then turned this data into a fictitious archipelago where each island is a cluster of similarly themed happy moments: Hobbies and creation, love, personal growth, children and so on.
On each of these islands then live dozens of cutely drawn cartoon characters that represent the individual happy moments.
Just clicking on these tiny cartoon characters and seeing their happy moments is a very rewarding experience. They are often really small ones, but seeing them make other people happy might make you look out for similar moments during your day as well.
A couple of examples:
I have been doing well at a new video game.
My dog was super happy to see me when I got home from lunch.
An annoying meeting got cancelled.
I was listening to my kids laugh in the car on the way home from school.
I found out that I had a little bit more money than I thought I had.
I ate at a new restaurant that opened up near me and loved the food.
You’ll definitely find a few gems when you click around this map for a couple of minutes. Try it!