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Research shows that sharing the same space for even just a few minutes a day with kind and friendly strangers makes us more optimistic, improves our self-esteem and makes us feel safer. It’s proven to deepen our connection with our surroundings, and generally helps us enjoy life that little bit more. When we give to others or act cooperatively, the reward centres of our own brain light up in acknowledgement. But strangers aren’t always inclined to be friendly to each other, and researchers now believe our shared spaces are becoming less friendly over time; particularly in built-up communities.

Professor Dacher Keltner, Social Psychologist at The University of California, Berkeley, uses a simple technique called the ‘Jen Ratio’ as a way of gauging the social well-being of any shared environment. It compares the total positive interactions between strangers against the total negative interactions, for a given period of time, in a given place. The higher the ratio the better the social well-being of the space, and the happier you’re likely to feel after spending time in it.

The Jen Ratio is a simple but powerful way to predict whether a particular place will contribute to our happiness positively in the long term, but so far research has been limited to small localised spaces and groups. Interestingly, a lot of existing Happiness reports draw from surveys and studies that ask participants to comment on their personal and surrounding happiness directly. Being based in observational behaviours, the Jen Ratio removes the potential bias in results of participants being overly generous or cynical – bringing a new authenticity to the results. It is truly representative of how people are naturally behaving.

In the first social experiment of it’s kind, we took the Jen Ratio for a test drive in a large-scale city-wide social study, brought to life in an immersive interactive experience. The Happy Forecast is a web-based interactive Map of London that ranks each parent postcode by the positivity of the communities that inhabit them.

Standard considerations for Londoners when looking for areas to live are usually fairly black and white; average house prices, local amenities, travel links and resale values etc. These are all high-priority concerns when settling on a location, but what these don’t tell you is how happy you’re likely to be within your chosen community during the time you live there. With a population of 8million+ and one of the largest metropolitan environments in the world, getting an indication of which areas of London are best to live in for social well-being and long-term Happiness is an important insight. Are the millionaires in Bishop’s Avenue likely to be better neighbours to each other than cheaper areas? Does Brixton’s community spirit reputation ring true?

After hand collecting the dataset across all 119 post codes, our overarching goals are to raise awareness, and encourage Londoners to increase their positive interactions with strangers. Representative of how people are naturally behaving.