Mappiness: Tracking Happiness in the Urban Environment

Want to find the key to happiness? There's an app for that. It's called Mappiness. Two researchers at the London School of Economics's Department of Geography and Environment, George MacKerron and Susana Mourato have created it to help them understand what kinds of environments make people happy in United Kingdom.

Once you download the Mappiness app, it beeps at random times during the day to ask you about your current happiness, as well as get contextual information like where you are, who you're with, and what you're doing. At the Mappiness site, you can see the data presented on a timeline and plotted on a Google map.

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MacKerron and Mourato hope the project will help them understand the relationship between happiness and aspects of people's environments such as pollution and greenspace. And anyone—in the United Kingdom or not—can use the app to track trends in their own wellbeing.