To activate the possible, we must first attend to ourselves and others in the here and now. This workshop proposes that awareness of well-being can serve as a pathway to realizing the latent possibilities of individuals and communities. Research on well-being has established that happiness is subjective and multidimensional. Diener's work on subjective well-being demonstrated that happiness depends on individual evaluation rather than objective conditions. Seligman's PERMA theory further articulated well-being as comprising Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Achievement. These findings suggest that well-being varies among individuals and is shaped through relationships. Yet articulating one's own well-being and imagining that of others remains challenging. To address this, our research team developed "Super Happy Birthday," a card game created as part of a JST RISTEX project in Japan（https://www.jst.go.jp/ristex/hite/en/index.html）. The game builds upon "Our Well-being Cards（https://socialwellbeing.ilab.ntt.co.jp/document/wellbeingcard_2024_26en.pdf）" a tool emerging from Japanese well-being research. In the game, one participant becomes the "protagonist" and selects cards representing their well-being factors. Other participants, with limited clues, improvisationally create and narrate a birthday plan intended to bring joy to the protagonist. This process requires empathic imagination toward others and the improvisational capacity to respond creatively under uncertainty. In this workshop, participants will learn the theoretical background, experience the game firsthand, and engage in reflection and discussion. Through this practice, we will explore how improvisation can function not merely as a performance technique but as a social practice that fosters mutual understanding and activates relational possibilities.
