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The Unproductive Joy Factory is a research-informed creative project exploring what happens when joy doesn’t have to prove that it’s useful. Founded by researcher, educator, writer, and creator Megan Zara, the Factory brings together research, creative practice, playful objects, experiments, and a frankly unreasonable number of tiny things to explore joy, play, productivity, connection, and the conditions that make delight possible.
If you’re a journalist, podcaster, researcher, educator, creator, event organizer, or fellow curious human interested in this work, you’re in the right place.
I’m available for interviews, podcasts, research conversations, speaking, creative collaborations, and interesting experiments.
→ Pitch Me Something Interesting
About The Unproductive Joy Factory
The Unproductive Joy Factory is part research project, part creative practice, part shop, and part ongoing experiment.
At the center of the project is a deceptively simple question:
What becomes possible when joy is allowed to matter before it proves that it’s useful?
UJF explores experiences of play, creativity, curiosity, connection, rest, silliness, and delight that do not need to produce an outcome to have been worthwhile. That doesn’t mean nothing useful can come from them. Quite a lot might. The distinction Megan is exploring is between an outcome and an obligation: something meaningful can emerge from an experience without becoming the reason the experience deserved to exist in the first place.
The Factory translates those questions into research, writing, creative experiments, objects, activities, prompts, and curated experiences designed to make joy easier to enter without prescribing what someone is supposed to find there.
No skill required. No outcome expected. Anything else is extra.
Copy + Paste Descriptions
Need to describe UJF in an article, event listing, podcast description, creator post, or introduction? Please feel free to use or adapt the language below.
UJF in one sentence
The Unproductive Joy Factory is a research-informed creative project exploring joy without required outcomes through research, play, creative practice, experiments, and thoughtfully created and curated invitations to joy.
Short description
The Unproductive Joy Factory is a research-informed creative project and shop founded by Megan Zara that explores what happens when joy doesn’t have to prove that it’s useful. Through research, writing, playful objects, creative experiments, and curated experiences, UJF creates invitations into play, curiosity, creativity, connection, and delight without requiring a productive outcome.
Longer description
The Unproductive Joy Factory is a research-informed creative project, shop, and ongoing experiment founded by researcher, educator, writer, and creator Megan Zara. UJF explores our relationships with joy, play, creativity, productivity, connection, and the conditions that make delight possible. Rather than promising to manufacture happiness, the Factory creates and curates invitations to joy: objects, experiences, prompts, research, and experiments designed to reduce some of the friction of beginning while leaving room for each person to decide what happens next. Its guiding premise is simple: an experience can produce meaningful outcomes without owing us one. No skill required. No outcome expected.
Meet Megan Zara
Joy researcher. Educator. Writer. Creator. Professional boxer of complicated things.
Megan Zara is the founder of The Unproductive Joy Factory and The Open Practice Academy. She is a researcher, educator, writer, creator, learning designer, consultant, and PhD student in Leadership and Change whose work examines how systems shape the ways people work, learn, lead, participate, and increasingly, experience joy.
Across a career spanning classroom teaching, educational technology, faculty development, libraries, open education, curriculum and learning design, consulting, and writing, Megan has repeatedly found herself doing a similar kind of work: taking complicated ideas, questions, resources, and experiences and creating containers that make them easier for people to enter.
At UJF, some of those containers are now literal boxes.
Her emerging joy research explores what makes joy easier or harder to access; what happens to play as we grow up; why people feel pressure to justify pleasurable uses of time; how productivity culture shapes our relationships with hobbies, rest, and creativity; how social and structural conditions affect access to joy; and what happens when an experience is allowed to matter without first producing something measurable.
Megan approaches this work from both scholarship and lived experience. She is explicit about distinguishing among research evidence, professional practice, observation, experimentation, and personal experience rather than treating them as interchangeable forms of knowledge.
She also really, really likes tiny things.
What I’m Researching
I’m not trying to develop a formula for happiness.
I’m interested in our relationship with joy and the conditions surrounding it.
That means asking questions about joy alongside questions about productivity, play, work, money, disability, culture, identity, relationships, access, care, creativity, adulthood, leadership, education, and the systems that influence what people believe they are allowed to do with their time.
I’m particularly interested in a tension at the center of the Factory: research may give us very good evidence that play, creativity, leisure, connection, rest, and pleasurable experiences can produce meaningful outcomes. But does demonstrating those outcomes inadvertently become another way of requiring joy to prove its usefulness?
My current working distinction is:
Outcome ≠ obligation.
An experience can produce something valuable without that outcome becoming a requirement for the experience to have been worthwhile.
This research is developing in public through The Joy Lab, where I share research notes, questions, reflections, experiments, and eventually deeper research reports as the work evolves.
Start exploring
What Is Unproductive Joy?
The foundational idea, what I mean by unproductive, and why joy doesn’t need a job.
Does Joy Need to Be Useful?
An exploration of intrinsic and instrumental value and the distinction between outcomes and obligations.
Creating & Curating Invitations to Joy
Why I don’t believe I can manufacture another person’s joy, and what it means instead to create conditions, containers, and possibilities for it.
Meet Megan: Joy Researcher
My positionality, professional path, tiny-object obsession, research questions, and why I’m building this strange little Factory in the first place.
Things I’d Love to Talk About
The questions behind UJF stretch well beyond craft kits or hobbies. I’m especially interested in conversations about:
unproductive joy and productivity culture; intrinsic versus instrumental value; why adults feel pressure to justify play; what happens when hobbies become side hustles; creativity without performance; designing conditions for joy without prescribing happiness; adult play, curiosity, and silliness; access to joy and the structural conditions surrounding it; tiny objects, gifting, kindness, and relational connection; neurodivergence and complicated relationships with productivity; joy, care, and relational practice; play and joy in education, leadership, and work; open and participatory approaches to creating experiences; and the contradiction of building a business around the idea that not everything needs to become productive.
I’m also perfectly happy to talk about tiny flowers, toy shopping as an adult, why craft projects somehow acquire project managers, or whether an unnecessarily small ceramic duck can be a legitimate object of intellectual inquiry.
I have thoughts.
Creating + Curating
I use the phrase creating and curating joy, but I don’t believe I can manufacture joy for another person.
Joy is personal, contextual, and unpredictable.
What I can create are invitations.
Sometimes I make the object, activity, prompt, writing, or experience. Other times I find materials, ideas, questions, textures, research, colors, and tiny ridiculous things that weren’t originally connected and intentionally bring them together.
I’m interested in what happens when we reduce some of the friction between that looks fun and actually beginning. That might mean gathering supplies, removing unnecessary decisions, providing enough structure to make something approachable, or simply creating an opening someone is curious enough to enter.
The goal is enough structure to enter and enough freedom to play.
I make the invitation.
What happens next belongs to the person receiving it.
→ Read: Creating & Curating Invitations to Joy
Collaborate With the Factory
I’m interested in collaborations that create genuine room for curiosity, experimentation, connection, play, and shared inquiry. They don’t have to fit neatly into a traditional category, and I’m especially interested in ideas where the answer to “What exactly would happen if we tried this?” is “I’m not completely sure yet.”
Possible collaborations include podcast and media interviews, research conversations, speaking and workshops, creator partnerships, educational collaborations, product and creative collaborations, participatory joy experiments, research-informed content, events, community projects, and interdisciplinary work around joy, play, care, creativity, openness, learning, and leadership.
If you have something else in mind, that may be even more interesting.
Please only pitch partnerships that make sense for the project and the people involved. UJF isn’t interested in attaching “joy” to something simply because it makes good marketing copy. I’m interested in thoughtful collaborations where there is genuine alignment, curiosity, and room to make something worthwhile together.
→ Pitch Me Something Interesting
The Factory in Brief
Name: The Unproductive Joy Factory
Founder: Megan Zara
Founded: 2026
What it is: A research-informed creative project, shop, and ongoing experiment in joy without required outcomes
What we do: Research, writing, creative experiments, playful objects, and created + curated invitations to joy
Research interests: Joy, play, productivity, creativity, curiosity, connection, care, access, adulthood, leisure, leadership, learning, and the conditions surrounding joyful experience
Guiding idea: Outcome ≠ obligation
Signature phrase: No skill required. No outcome expected.
Also important: Anything else is extra.
Research home: The Joy Lab
Website: theunproductivejoyfactory.com
TikTok: tiktok.com/@unproductivejoy
Facebook: The Unproductive Joy Factory
Brand + Media Assets
Need a logo, founder photo, product image, UJF illustration, short biography, project description, or other asset for a story or collaboration?
You’re welcome to use the approved media assets provided here when covering or collaborating with The Unproductive Joy Factory. Please don’t substantially alter logos or illustrations, and please credit The Unproductive Joy Factory where appropriate.
Available / coming soon:
UJF logos and marks; approved brand illustrations; founder headshots; product and Factory photography; founder biographies; approved project descriptions; and a downloadable media kit.
→ View Media Assets (Coming Soon)
A Note About the Research
The Unproductive Joy Factory is an evolving research and creative practice. Ideas shared through the Factory may draw from peer-reviewed scholarship, books and other published work, professional practice, lived experience, observation, conversation, experimentation, and creative inquiry.
Those are not interchangeable forms of evidence.
When I describe findings from research, my goal is to identify and cite the scholarship supporting those claims. When I’m sharing an observation, interpretation, working theory, experiment, or personal experience, I’ll try to tell you that too.
Some of the questions I’m exploring will change as I learn more.
That’s not a bug.
That’s the research.
Want to Make Something Interesting Together?
If something here made you think I need to talk to this person, I’d probably like to hear why.
Tell me who you are, what you’re working on, what caught your attention, and what you’re imagining. It can be a polished proposal. It can also be the beginning of an idea that needs another person to think with.
Journalists, podcasters, researchers, educators, creators, organizations, event organizers, and fellow curious humans are welcome.