I can’t put joy in a box. But maybe I can make it easier to find your way toward it.
I say that the Unproductive Joy Factory is about creating and curating joy, but there is a problem with that sentence: I can’t actually create joy for you. I can’t manufacture it. I can’t guarantee that something I love will make you happy, and I definitely can’t put twelve ounces of delight into a cardboard box, tape it shut, print a shipping label, and send it through the mail.
Which is a little inconvenient, considering the name of the business.
But thinking about that limitation has actually helped me become much clearer about what I believe I’m doing here. I create and curate invitations to joy.
That distinction matters to me.
I can make the invitation.
Joy is personal, contextual, and unpredictable. The thing that makes me ridiculously happy might do absolutely nothing for you. A craft that feels freeing to one person might feel frustrating to another. A crowded concert might be somebody’s favorite place in the world and somebody else’s sensory nightmare. Gardening can be play, work, obligation, art, food production, relaxation, annoyance, or some complicated combination of all of those depending on the person and the day.
I don’t get to determine what joy feels like for somebody else, and I don’t want to.
What I can do is think carefully about what makes an experience easier to enter. I can gather the materials, remove unnecessary decisions, make the instructions forgiving, and offer possibilities instead of requirements. I can create something beautiful or weird enough to make you curious. I can ask a question, introduce an idea, put a tiny flower somewhere unexpected, or simply make an opening where there wasn’t one before.
Then I have to leave room for you.
Sometimes I create. Sometimes I curate.
This distinction also became important as I figured out what the Factory actually is. Sometimes I create the thing. I write the prompt, design the card, develop the activity, make the object, build the experience, write about the research, or invent the tiny ridiculous thing that apparently needed to exist in the world.
Other times I curate. I find objects, ideas, materials, textures, colors, questions, activities, research, and tiny delights that weren’t originally connected to one another and bring them together intentionally. The creative act isn’t always making every individual piece from scratch. Sometimes the creative work is recognizing that these particular things belong together and imagining what might become possible when someone encounters them that way.
Often, it’s both.
That’s what happened with the Flower Box. I didn’t manufacture every object inside it, but I created the experience around them. I asked what someone might want to touch, what might invite experimentation, what might feel delightful before they’ve made anything at all, what decisions I could remove, and where I could give enough guidance to make starting easier without prescribing what the finished thing was supposed to look like.
The box becomes a container, but the container isn’t the experience. It’s an entrance to one.
Apparently, I’ve been doing this for a long time.
This is where the Factory unexpectedly connects to the rest of my work. I’ve spent much of my career creating containers people can enter.
As a teacher, those containers were lessons, questions, projects, and conversations. In educational technology, they became resources and learning experiences that made intimidating tools easier to approach. In faculty development, I designed conditions where people could question, experiment, talk, and make meaning together. In open education, I’ve spent years thinking about what happens when we don’t just give people access to something, but create conditions in which they can participate, adapt, question, contribute, and create.
In consulting and learning design, I build structures that help people enter complicated ideas and systems. As a writer, I do it with language. As a researcher, I am increasingly interested in the conditions surrounding whether people can enter at all.
And now, apparently, I also do it with tiny vases and googly eyes.
Different boxes. Similar question: What can I create that makes it easier for someone else to enter?
Beginning has friction.
This matters because joyful things can be surprisingly difficult to begin. Imagine deciding you want to try a craft. First, you have to figure out which craft. Then you need a tutorial. Then you have to determine which supplies you need, only to discover that the tutorial assumes you already own seventeen highly specific objects. You order a package containing 400 of something when you need six. You watch somebody on the internet complete the entire project flawlessly in 43 seconds. You finally start making yours and realize it looks absolutely nothing like theirs.
Congratulations. Your delightful little hobby now has procurement, logistics, quality assurance, and a performance evaluation.
I joke about this because I have done it, but I’m genuinely interested in that friction. How much joy disappears between “that looks fun” and actually doing the thing? How much energy do we spend getting ourselves to the threshold of an experience before we’re ever able to experience it? And what happens if some of those barriers disappear?
That’s one of the things curation can do. It doesn’t have to prescribe the experience. It can simply make entering it a little easier.
Enough structure to enter. Enough freedom to play.
The balance between structure and freedom fascinates me. Too little structure can make an experience overwhelming. Tell me I can do absolutely anything I want and there is a decent chance I will suddenly forget every activity humans have ever enjoyed.
But too much structure changes the experience, too. Follow these seventeen steps. Use these exact materials. Make yours look like this picture. Complete the project. Produce the correct object. Now we’ve wandered back into performance.
I’m interested in the space between those extremes: enough structure to help someone begin and enough freedom for what happens next to belong to them.
That is increasingly how I think about the Factory. The box, kit, object, prompt, activity, or idea provides a starting place, but it doesn’t have to determine the destination. You can follow the instructions. Ignore them. Change them. Stop halfway through. Give the supplies to somebody else. Make something entirely different. Decide you’d rather play with the tiny flower than do the craft it came with.
There is no rubric.
The box isn’t the joy.
This is especially important because I sell things. It would be very easy for a project like this to slide into buy this product and experience joy, and that isn’t what I believe.
I don’t believe consumption is the solution to joylessness, and I certainly don’t believe people need to buy something from me in order to experience unproductive joy. You don’t. Go outside and find a weird leaf. Draw a face on a sticky note. Dance badly in your kitchen. Text your friend something ridiculous. Arrange the pens on your desk according to which ones you think would survive longest in the wilderness. Please explain your ranking to absolutely no one.
Joy does not require a purchase.
What I’m offering through the Factory is something more specific: a deliberately designed invitation. Sometimes paying for that invitation may be useful because somebody else has already done the gathering, thinking, sourcing, organizing, designing, and decision-making. You’re not buying joy. You’re buying a container someone built to make beginning easier.
What happens once you enter it belongs to you.
And this is why tiny things matter to me, too.
I really love tiny things. This is not a sophisticated theoretical position. Tiny flowers are delightful. Tiny vases are delightful. Tiny versions of ordinary objects that have absolutely no practical reason to be tiny are, scientifically speaking,* extremely good.
*This is not currently a scientific claim.
But I’m also interested in what tiny objects can do relationally. A tiny flower can sit on somebody’s desk. It can travel in a pocket. It can become an inside joke. It can be handed to another person with almost no ceremony at all and communicate, I saw this and thought of you.
That fascinates me because sometimes connection happens through enormous conversations, and sometimes it happens because somebody hands you a two-inch ceramic duck.
Small objects can become pathways between people. So can questions. So can activities. So can jokes. So can care. Part of what I’m curating isn’t only an individual’s experience with an object; I’m interested in the ways these little invitations might move between people and become opportunities for communication, kindness, connection, and shared delight.
I don’t want to prescribe joy.
This may be the most important part. The Factory isn’t an attempt to determine what people should enjoy, and I don’t want to create another system in which someone else decides the correct way for you to experience your own life. I’m much more interested in possibility.
What might happen if this were here? What might you make? What might you notice? Who might you give this to? What might you do differently? What happens if you don’t finish it, use it completely incorrectly, or discover that you hate it?
That’s information, too.
An invitation has to include the possibility of saying no. Otherwise it isn’t much of an invitation.
Creating conditions, not outcomes.
I think this may be the clearest way I currently understand my work. I cannot create another person’s joy, but I can think carefully about the conditions surrounding it.
I can create and curate. I can remove some friction. I can make an entrance visible. I can make room for curiosity, offer permission, introduce a little weirdness, and design something that doesn’t require expertise. I can resist telling you what you’re supposed to get from it. I can make something easier to enter without deciding what you’re supposed to find once you’re inside.
And then I can get out of the way.
Maybe you experience joy. Maybe you don’t. Maybe something entirely different happens. Respecting that uncertainty is part of respecting the person on the other side of the invitation.
So when I say I’m creating and curating joy, what I really mean is that I’m creating and curating possibilities for joy: little pathways, containers, openings, experiments, and tiny things passed between people.
I’m making the invitation.
What happens next is yours.
No skill required. No outcome expected.