Foresight – The Future of Happiness


Discourse Analysis For Future Scenarios – The future of happiness

Discourse Analysis project was the great challenge of working in a bigger team about seven people including me [Andria, Jessie, Jose, Jee, Charlotte, Naoki]. Learning a new method of researching through past and present discourses in order to forecast a future scenario through reading and experimenting with a way to collaborate is a tough job. Although, we were all lost at first but eventually come to a good ending.

Discourse analysis is looking to all discursive arguments or behaviours or practices that construct or frame the way people think and act within a specific context, society and timeframe. In this project, we looked into the discourse of happiness. We analyse how people have been thinking and defining happiness, how they have been acting upon their belief of happiness from the past to present. We recognise the patterns of how 'happiness' has been changing through the authorities, institutions, practices and objects involved in the discourse. Then we tend to see the key drivers of how 'happiness' could be in the futures, how people could change the way people thought, see, behave and express their happiness in the next twenty years time.

I was excited of this method of researching past and present trends to forecast the plausible futures. I found myself have a good contribution in both divergent and convergent thinking along the process, creatively open up 'what if...' question and strategically asking 'why' it needs to be that answer as well as guiding a way to work and facilitating my team. However, I strongly believe that this kind of project cannot be done alone, it needs collaboration to expose all possible ideas. Working in this team project is a big opportunity to develop my interpersonal skills with international culture collaborators.


December 2015