Design for Wellbeing

16    16It’s love, my friend! Some reflections on cultivating the positive design plot

Pieter M.A. Desmet

One is not allowed in the modern culture to speak about love, except in the most romantic and trivial sense of the word. Anyone who calls upon the capacity of people to practice brotherly and sisterly love is more likely to be ridiculed than to be taken seriously. The deepest difference between optimists and pessimists is their position in the debate about whether human beings are able to operate collectively from a basis of love.

(Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows and Jørgen Randers, 1992, p. 233)

Introduction

What makes humans truly happy? A question of existential importance to each of us as individuals, as much as it is of professional ...