Tracy L Blom

Inspired by designer and creator Laura Kampf, ‘the happy machine’ encourages kids to take a second look at items before throwing them away and find creative ways to repurpose them.

In this story Laura turns broken, discarded toys into a one-of-a-kind carousel, reminding us that things don’t have to cost a lot of money to evoke joy.

The Happiness Craft Challenge began as a Valentine’s Day project which challenged kids to create handmade items to bring others joy. In just a couple of weeks, we collected over 200 handmade Valentines donated to the Ronald McDonald House on Valentine’s Day!!

Now, every month the challenge continues! Schools around the country are welcome to participate in the Happiness Craft Challenge and see what joy-evoking creations they can come up with.

If your school would like to take part, click the button below!

Laura Kampf is a clever, funny 35-year-old Content Creator/Maker/ YouTuber from Cologne, Germany. While studying design in college and experimenting with 3 dimensional concepts her urge to build prototypes grew—so she started building a workshop and improving her skills. A couple years later she rediscovered her interest in filmmaking and combined the two passions and started making videos for YouTube. Now, every week Laura builds a new project and documents her process along the way. Every Sunday one of her videos is published, and on Monday it’s back to brass tacks, starting from scratch.  

Being able to focus on the process rather than the product allows her to explore not only the good ideas but also the bad ones—which is sometimes a lot more interesting. 

“The reason for building the Happy Machine…well, because that´s what I do. I walk through life with open eyes and try to find new purposes for things that get thrown away or abandoned, and in this case a bike became the Happy Machine.”