"Happiness by Design is a fascinating contribution to the fate of modernisms at midcentury. Justus Nieland unpacks the cheery products of Eames-era modern design as they manifest in material objects, in experimental films and multi-screen media, and in new forms of knowledge-making at conferences and lectures. He weaves all of this together in a rich and often surprising intellectual history of the midcentury 'good life' that questions how designers' attempts to fashion human happiness quickly devolved into sad stories and risky futures."–Lynn Spigel, author of TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television
"Happiness by Design is an astonishingly rich and inventive book. It immerses us in a world of midcentury modernism that feels connected to our present but is shaped by ideas and hopes we have perhaps forgotten. Justus Nieland has written a fantastic cultural history of the artists, filmmakers, and intellectuals who not only created some of the most iconic works of the period, but also whole environments filled with media and technologies actually designed to make life better."–Mark Goble, author of Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life
"Who doesn't want to be happy? Justus Nieland's brilliant book exposes the political and aesthetic stakes of this seemingly innocent desire voiced by so many of us in the present. Breaking new ground in film studies, Happiness by Design builds an account of how happiness became a technology, medium, and measure of human well-being and security. Happiness, in this book, is not just an emotion–it is a technique that has become central to how we imagine not only who we are but how we will survive in a rapidly changing world."–Orit Halpern, author of Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945
