Skip to main content

Designing a Humorous Workplace: Improving and Retaining Employee’s Happiness

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Advances in Affective and Pleasurable Design

Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 483))

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss the possibilities of adapting humorous smart technologies to the workplace. Also, we discuss the precautions that need to be taken when introducing the theories of humor. We explore adapting the theories of humor and the pros and cons of integrating it in the workplace. We believe the adaptation of this technology will help current and future employees at companies to improve and retain their happiness. We also provide a brief explanation of the different types of humorous technologies: mobile, physical, and virtual and how they can be beneficial in the workplace. Suggestions of how to evaluate these systems are also provided.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 169.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 219.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Rampersad, H.K.: The way to a highly engaged and happy workforce based on the personal balanced scorecard. Total Qual. Manag. 19(1–2), 11–27 (2008)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  2. Herzog, R.: Dead Funny. Humor in Hitler’s Germany. Melville House, Brooklyn (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Nijholt, A.: Designing humor for playable cities. Procedia Manuf. 3, 2175–2182 (2015)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Yu, Y., Nam, T.J.: Let’s giggle!: design principles for humorous products. In: Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, pp. 275–284. ACM, New York, NY, USA, June 2014

    Google Scholar 

  5. Nijholt, A.: Humor techniques: from real world and game environments to smart environments. In: Distributed, Ambient, and Pervasive Interactions, pp. 659–670. Springer, Berlin (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Bergson, H.: Laughter. An essay on the meaning of the comic. Translated from Le Rire. Essai sur la signification du comique. Gutenberg project, 2003 (1900)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Hofstede, G.J.: Humour across cultures: an appetizer (2009). Retrieved from http://www.dialogin.com/fileadmin/Files/User_uploads/Humour.pdf

  8. Freud, S.: Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. W.W. Norton, New York (1905)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Raskin, V. (ed.): The Primer of Humor Research. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Friedman, L.W., Friedman, H.H.: A Framework for the Study of Computer-Oriented Humor (Cohum) (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Mead, R.: Space, speech, and gesture in human-robot interaction. In: Proceedings of the 14th ACM international Conference on Multimodal Interaction, pp. 333–336. ACM, New York, Oct 2012

    Google Scholar 

  12. Tay, B.T., Low, S.C., Ko, K.H., Park, T.: Types of humor that robots can play. Comput. Hum. Behav. 60, 19–28 (2016)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Becker-Asano, C., Kanda, T., Ishi, C., Ishiguro, H.: How about laughter? Perceived naturalness of two laughing humanoid robots. In: Cohn, J., Nijholt, A., Pantic, M. (eds.) 3rd International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, pp. 49–51. IEEE Press, New York (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Coleman, G.: Phreaks, hackers, and trolls: the politics of transgression and spectacle. Social Media Reader 99–119 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Wen, M., Baym, N., Tamuz, O., Teevan, J., Dumais, S., Kalai, A.: OMG UR funny! Computer-aided humor with an application to chat. In: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Computational Creativity, p. 86, June 2015

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marvin Andujar .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2017 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this paper

Cite this paper

Andujar, M., Nijholt, A., Gilbert, J.E. (2017). Designing a Humorous Workplace: Improving and Retaining Employee’s Happiness. In: Chung, W., Shin, C. (eds) Advances in Affective and Pleasurable Design . Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 483. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41661-8_66

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41661-8_66

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-41660-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-41661-8

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics