The quest for happiness has been the direct or indirect subject of a huge chunk of intellectual endeavor: philosophy, theology, psychology, economics and, of course, literature, which has tended to cast a jaundiced eye on the matter. “To be stupid and selfish and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness,” Flaubert wrote, “though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.”


You could say that the world of design aims ultimately at happiness, too, through the elegance of a font or the feel of an iPhone. But a few years ago the Austrian-born graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister decided to take on the problem of happiness more directly, in much the same way he has approached ad campaigns and the celebrated album covers he has designed for David Byrne and the Rolling Stones.


“I know how presumptuous it sounds,” he said recently, smiling, in his offices on West 23rd Street in Chelsea. “I also knew I had to find a way to limit it, because it’s just too crazy-huge a problem. You could spend your whole life on it, as lots of philosophers have.”


Happiness is not a problem that Mr. Sagmeister has struggled with much personally. On a scale of 1 to 10, he rates himself a provisional 8. But in 2008, during a yearlong sabbatical in Indonesia that he chose to devote mostly to making furniture, he received some blunt feedback from a close friend.


“He said if I was taking a whole year off, and at the end of it I had only some tables and chairs to show, then it would be pretty skimpy, wouldn’t it?” Mr. Sagmeister said. “And that somehow seemed true, even though I didn’t want to hear it.”


So he started to work instead on an ambitious, unusual feature-length documentary, “The Happy Film,” a kind of delivery vehicle for several years of thinking and reading about the nature of happiness. The film is not yet finished but it has spun off an equally unusual art — or maybe design, or maybe amateur sociology — exhibition, “The Happy Show,” that opens on Wednesday at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and later travels to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.


The approach of the show to its momentous topic can be gauged partly through one of its invitations: a thin, scrumptious-looking slice of Austrian beerwurst, vacuum-sealed in plastic, with the word “HAPPY” cut out of it. “Because, when you get down to it, it seems that the two things that lead most quickly and reliably to happiness are having sex and eating rich, fatty foods,” said Mr. Sagmeister, who worked for weeks to perfect the sausage invitation with a fellow designer, Jessica Walsh.


But Mr. Sagmeister’s extensive reading— primarily in the field of positive psychology, pioneered by Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania and explored by fellow psychologists like Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia — led him to a slightly more complex view of how to achieve happiness now. The conclusion he reached was that the three most widely agreed-upon routes were: meditation, cognitive behavioral therapy and psychotropic drugs. He decided to spend a considerable amount of time testing each, while filming the process.


“The question I wanted to answer was, could I train my mind to be happy, the same way one trains one’s body?” he said. “In running, I know that I can train as much as I want and I’m never going to break the world record for the five miles. It’s partly genetics; I’m just not built for it. But if I worked really hard, I might be able to cut my time by half. Could I do the same thing with my mind and my well-being?”


The positive psychology movement, only about a decade old, arose in reaction to psychology’s decades-long focus on treating mental illness. The movement tries instead to find ways to measure and promote well-being, in people, families, communities, even governments. Among its researchers’ finding is that happiness is only weakly related to wealth; that people who frequently express gratitude tend to be healthier; and, perhaps worryingly for Mr. Sagmeister, that trying to maximize happiness can lead to unhappiness.


For years before his Indonesian sojourn, he was already carrying on a more or less public inquiry into his own well-being as an analogue to his design practice. An inveterate list maker, he keeps a diary that is more like a spreadsheet, in which he rates himself weekly in several areas of self-improvement he chooses at the beginning of each year. In a 2004 talk for the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) lecture series, he enumerated what were then the 14 happiest moments in his life, one of which, dated 1985, he described simply as, “With Andrea in Tivoligasse, orgasm.”


With Dr. Haidt signed on as an adviser to the film, Mr. Sagmeister began to apply positive-psychology research more systematically in 2011 in Bali, where he went to meditate for the first time in his life, spending three months in intensive sessions.