The Happiness Machine Finds & Prints Happiness Found Online

I love it when people’s creativity gets pumping in a geeky way, and they create little machines that are not very practical, but they bridge the gap between online and offline information. Those types of machines are always interesting, and sometimes they even feel cozy. When you start looking at some of these types of inventions and hacks, you see that a machine doesn’t have to be practical to bring happiness into the world. This happiness machine is a great example of that.

This reminds me of the printer that prints tweets on toilet paper, the applause sound machine that is activated by Facebook likes and the vending machine that dispenses drinks when someone tweets a certain hashtag. All of these things (and many more that we’ve written about) make the world seem even smaller since they flavor our offline world with a taste of our online world.

The happiness machine, which you see below, was created by Brendan Dawes. You can click over to his website to read all the geeky details, but in a nutshell, it scans the Internet for the word “happy” and then prints whatever random phrase it found that word in. When you hit that big black button, the happiness machine brings the happiness from the Internet into our real lives by printing messages (in very close to real time) on paper that looks kind of like the paper receipts are printed on. Just like you would with a receipt, you can tear the paper off and take it with you, or even share the happiness you found with others.

The happiness machine is being called an “Internet connected printer” and a “content delivery mechanism.” Whatever you want to call it, I’m a big fan of anything that promotes happiness, so I give it an A+. Brendan recently updated his happiness machine so now it has the option to print sad messages too. Nah, I’d just stick to the happy ones.