Meet the Joy Research

Hi, I’m Megan. I box things.

Literally and figuratively.

It took me a surprisingly long time to realize this.

I’ve spent most of my career taking complicated ideas, resources, questions, experiences, and sometimes actual stuff and putting them into containers that make it easier for someone else to enter.

I’ve boxed things to help people learn. To help people teach. To make overwhelming things feel possible. To create pathways into knowledge, communication, participation, and connection. To help people see something differently. To help people feel a little less alone.

And now I put tiny flowers, craft supplies, fidgets, ridiculous little objects, and invitations to play into actual boxes.

Apparently, I’ve been training for the Unproductive Joy Factory for years.

So, what exactly is a joy researcher?

That’s the name I’ve started giving to part of the work I’m doing here.

I’m interested in joy not just as a feeling, but as something we can ask questions about.

What makes joy easier or harder to access? What happens to play as we grow up? Why do so many of us feel the need to justify how we spend our time? How do productivity, work, money, culture, identity, relationships, disability, and the structures around us shape our capacity for joy? What creates the conditions for curiosity, creativity, silliness, connection, rest, and delight?

And what happens when we stop treating joy as something that has to earn its keep?

I’m especially interested in the ways we justify joy by pointing to what it can do for us.

It helps my mental health. It makes me more creative. It makes me a better leader. It helps me recharge so I can be more productive.

Those things may be true. In fact, research gives us plenty of reasons to investigate the relationships among joy, play, creativity, connection, well-being, learning, and work.

But I’m interested in a question that comes before all of those outcomes:

What if joy doesn’t have to make us healthier, better, more creative, more resilient, or more productive to be worth having?

That question is at the heart of the Unproductive Joy Factory.

I research what we know about joy and the conditions surrounding it. I bring ideas from different fields into conversation with one another. I experiment through making, playing, creating, and curating. And I pay attention to the places where research, lived experience, and my own assumptions don’t neatly agree.

I’m not trying to develop a formula for happiness.

I’m trying to understand our relationship with joy, while leaving enough room for joy to remain wonderfully, stubbornly unnecessary.

Where I’m Standing

I don’t study joy from outside of it.

I’m a researcher, educator, writer, creator, parent, business owner, and PhD student. I’m also neurodivergent. I’m autistic and live with bipolar II disorder, ADD, generalized anxiety disorder, OCD, and chronic pain.

Those aren’t footnotes to this work. They shape the place from which I ask these questions.

I know what it feels like to live in a body and brain whose capacity doesn’t always match what the world expects of it. I know the complicated relationship that can create with productivity: wanting to do things, loving to do things, sometimes doing far too many things, and also encountering days when things other people experience as simple require an enormous amount of effort.

I know what it is to measure myself by what I accomplished and to feel the weight of what I couldn’t.

I also know what it is to struggle with suicidal ideation.

So when I talk about joy, I’m not talking about a cute accessory to an otherwise productive life. Finding and intentionally making room for joy has, at times, been a literal lifesaver for me.

That doesn’t mean joy cured me. It hasn’t. I don’t believe joy is a treatment plan, and I would never suggest that someone can craft, play, or positive-think their way out of mental illness, disability, pain, or circumstances that are hurting them.

It means that in a life that can sometimes become very heavy, I have learned that small experiences of delight, play, curiosity, connection, beauty, silliness, and care can matter enormously.

Sometimes that looks like making something with my hands. Sometimes it’s coffee in a mug I love. Sometimes my partner and I go to the toy store without our kids, pick out toys for ourselves, go home, and actually play with them. Sometimes it’s an unnecessarily tiny object. Sometimes it’s making another person laugh.

None of these things fixes everything.

They don’t have to.

That may be one reason I resist requiring joy to produce an outcome. I’ve spent enough of my life in systems that measure what bodies and brains can produce. I don’t want joy to become another place where I have to perform successfully.

At the same time, I recognize that access to joy isn’t distributed equally. Telling someone to “make time for joy” can become one more individual responsibility we hand people while ignoring whether they have the time, safety, money, energy, freedom, access, relationships, or support that make doing so possible.

That matters to my philosophy too.

I don’t believe there is one universal experience of joy. I don’t assume what brings me joy will bring someone else joy. And I don’t believe I can manufacture joy for another person and put it in a box.

What I can do is create and curate invitations to joy.

I can reduce some of the friction of beginning. I can gather materials. Create an experience. Ask a question. Share research. Make something strange. Offer permission. Build a pathway. Send a tiny flower. Create opportunities for people to connect with themselves and with one another.

Then I have to leave room for the other person.

My work is informed by scholarship, professional practice, lived experience, observation, conversation, experimentation, and making. Those aren’t interchangeable forms of knowledge, and part of my responsibility as a researcher is to be clear about which one I’m drawing from when I make a claim.

I’m not approaching the Unproductive Joy Factory because I’ve figured joy out.

I’m building it because I haven’t. I’m living the questions alongside the people I invite into them.

And right now, one of the questions I care about most is this:

What becomes possible when joy is allowed to matter before it proves that it’s useful?

That’s where I’m standing.

I’ve been building containers for a long time.

Before I was a joy researcher putting tiny flowers into tiny vases, I was a middle school teacher.

I took enormous subjects and boxed them into lessons, questions, projects, conversations, and experiences that gave young people different ways into learning.

Then I moved into digital learning and educational technology. There, I often took technologies, systems, and possibilities that felt intimidating or inaccessible and created training, resources, processes, and experiences that helped people experiment with them.

In faculty development, I built professional learning experiences. I wasn’t interested only in giving people information. I wanted to create conditions where people could question, try, talk, connect, and make meaning together.

In libraries and open education, the questions became even bigger. Who gets access to knowledge? Who gets to participate in creating it? Who gets left outside? What happens when we open the box and let people not only see what’s inside, but use it, adapt it, question it, and contribute something of their own?

As a curriculum and learning designer, I’ve built containers for experiences.

As a consultant and founder of The Open Practice Academy, I help people make complicated systems visible and create structures that better reflect the values they say they hold.

As a writer, I put experiences, questions, grief, care, absurdity, and possibility into another kind of container: language.

And as a researcher and PhD student, I study the structures surrounding all of it.

Different jobs. Different settings. Different boxes.

But underneath them is a question I’ve been asking in one form or another for a very long time:

What can I create that makes it easier for someone else to enter?

The Unproductive Joy Factory is my newest answer.

I really, really love tiny things.

This probably deserves its own section because it is both completely unserious and very serious to me.

I love tiny flowers. Tiny vases. Tiny toys. Tiny surprises. Miniature versions of ordinary objects that have absolutely no reason to be miniature.

Show me something unnecessarily small and my day has already improved.

But there’s something underneath that delight that connects to how I think about this work.

Something doesn’t have to be enormous to change the texture of a moment.

A tiny object can interrupt an ordinary Tuesday.

It can make someone laugh. It can sit on a desk and remind someone of another person. It can travel between two people and communicate, I saw this and thought of you. It can invite curiosity. It can become a little ritual. It can simply be delightful.

I’m fascinated by those tiny pathways between people. Kindness works like that sometimes, too.

So does care.

So does joy.

Creating & Curating Joy

I describe what I do through the Factory as creating and curating joy.

That doesn’t mean I can manufacture joy and put it in a box. Joy is personal, contextual, unpredictable, and entirely yours.

What I can do is create and curate invitations to it.

Sometimes I make the thing. Sometimes I find the thing. Sometimes I bring together objects, activities, ideas, questions, textures, colors, research, and tiny ridiculous things that weren’t originally connected at all and create an experience from them.

That distinction matters to me.

I’m not interested in simply selling stuff that makes people happy. I’m interested in thoughtfully creating pathways into play, curiosity, creativity, connection, kindness, and delight.

Sometimes the hardest part of doing something joyful is getting started.

You have to decide what to do. Find the supplies. Buy seventeen things when you only need half an ounce of one of them. Figure out whether you’re doing it “right.” Watch the tutorial. Compare your version to somebody else’s. Wonder what you’re going to do with the finished thing.

By then, your delightful little hobby has somehow acquired a project manager.

I want to remove some of that.

Here. Open the box. Pick something up. Make the thing. Or don’t.

Give the tiny flower to somebody. Keep it forever. Put googly eyes somewhere they absolutely do not belong. There is no rubric.

I create and curate the invitation. You get to decide what happens next.

There is, admittedly, a pretty big contradiction here.

Yes.

I created a business around the idea that not everything needs to become productive.

I am aware. 😂

Running the Unproductive Joy Factory is work. Products cost money. Boxes require postage. Websites need updating. Research takes time. Inventory exists despite my personal objections to spreadsheets. And capitalism remains stubbornly committed to asking me to pay my bills.

So no, building this business is not inherently unproductive joy.

Except sometimes it is.

Because I’m trying something different with my expectations of it.

Of course I hope people buy things. I hope the Factory grows. I hope people connect with the research. I hope it creates opportunities, relationships, conversations, and experiences I can’t imagine yet.

But none of those things have to happen for making it to have been worthwhile.

I am researching something that fascinates me. I am making things. I am playing. I am following strange little threads of curiosity. I am building a world I think should exist.

Anything it does beyond that is extra.

And that may be one of the most important experiments happening here.

Can I care deeply about something without requiring it to prove its value? Can I make something thoughtfully without demanding that it succeed? Can something matter because I loved doing it, even if nothing measurable comes from it?

I don’t know.

That’s why it’s an experiment.

Unproductive doesn’t mean nothing happens.

This distinction matters to me. Something beautiful might happen because you made room for unproductive joy.

You might calm down. You might laugh. You might discover something about yourself. You might make a friend. You might reconnect with someone you love. You might learn something. You might heal something. You might become more creative. You might even become more productive afterward.

Fine.

But you don’t owe the experience any of those outcomes.

Unproductive joy doesn’t mean nothing comes from it. It means nothing has to come from it for the experience to have been worthwhile.

That’s the difference I’m exploring.

So, welcome to my weird little Factory.

This is part shop, part research project, part creative practice, part philosophical experiment, and part excuse for me to buy tiny things in quantities that are becoming increasingly difficult to explain to my partner.

I’m researching joy. I’m questioning productivity. I’m making things. I’m creating little pathways toward connection, communication, kindness, curiosity, and play.

And sometimes I’m putting all of that into a literal box and mailing it to somebody. Which, as it turns out, is kind of what I’ve always done.

No skill required. No outcome expected.

Anything else is extra.