Design your happiness

I have been hooked onto TED for some time now for the jaw-dropping, inspiring and beautiful (those are the sort categories on the site) talks on topics ranging from string theory to the intelligence of crows to global warming all of them lasting 15-20 mins only. Once in a while I do bump into goldmines like this which compensates my not-so-worthy-orkut-facebook-Gmail time on the web.
One of the speeches titled 'yes, design can me you happy' was the most amazing for me till date since I could relate to everything that it said. Summarizing the speech the speaker talks about the various designs in his life that gave him happiness. He is a graphic designer by profession which justifies his reason for the happiness he derives from designs. After seeing the video I tried to list down the last few instances in my life when I felt really happy (which was a tough list to put down). Ok I'm not going to list down stuff here but what I realized from the list was that materialistic happiness definitely scored over emotional happiness in my life.Those are probably 2 unheard of terms, let me give you examples of materialistic happiness from my list – when I saw the new Dell XPS laptop, my office and the the designs on the walls (huge gaming product headquarters), when I first saw the ford mustang GT, everytime I browse Flickr, …. And happiness derived from emotions would be from things like friendship, love, satisfaction.
That's probably one of the reasons I love photography for the art and design which you can visualize, I try to analyze patterns very frequently without my knowledge like the formation of the push pins on my office corkboard or the crooked lines between traffic lanes when I'm stuck on the lights. Not that these give me any kind of happiness but when I see some design well done (both natural or manmade) I definitely spend some time to appreciate it and rethink why I would have done it the same way it is done. Having said that I am no way a designer or a connoisseur of design, it's just that i feel i see a lot more of them in my daily life than others do.