How much joy do you find in the town or city where you live? In your specific neighborhood? What activities bring you the most joy? How often do you engage in them? Can you do them at or near your home? Who are the most joyful people in your life? How often do you see them?ĭo you work for a company that’s pro-joy, joy-neutral, or anti-joy? How appropriate is it to laugh out loud at your workplace? How highly does your significant other or family value joy? What emotions do you feel when you walk into your home at the end of the day? How about when you enter each room? When was the last time you felt a true, unfettered moment of joy? How can you tell if your surroundings are joyful or not? Think about these questions: “ The power of the aesthetics of joy is that they speak directly to our unconscious minds, bringing out the best in us without our even being aware of it. Renewal: blossoming, expansion, and curves” “In all, I identified ten aesthetics of joy, each of which reveals a distinct connection between the feeling of joy and the tangible qualities of the world around us:Ībundance: lushness, multiplicity, and varietyįreedom: nature, wilderness, and open spaceĬelebration: synchrony, sparkle, and bursting shapes Specifically, it’s what designers call aesthetics - the properties that define the way an object looks and feels - that give rise to the feeling of joy.” Setting it all laid out, I realized that though the feeling of joy is mysterious and ephemeral, we can access it it through tangible, physical attributes. And the common thread about bubbles, balloons, and hummingbirds also became clear: they were all things that floated gently in the air. A picture of a cathedral’s rose window puzzled me at first, but when I placed it next to a snowflake and a sunflower, it made sense: all had radiating symmetries. Vibrant quilts kept company with Matisse paintings and rainbow candies: all bursting with saturated color.

I saw lollipops, pom-poms, and polka dots, and it dawned on me: they were all round in shape. One day as I was studying them, something clicked. Each day I spent a few minutes adding new images, sorting them into categories and looking for patterns. I gathered pictures of these things and pinned them up on my studio wall.

They weren’t joyful for just a few people. “These pleasures cut across lines of age, gender, and ethnicity. For example, studies show that people with sunny workplaces sleep better and laugh more than their peers in dimly-lit offices, and that flowers improve not only people’s moods but their memory as well.” “ A body of research is emerging that demonstrates a clear link between our surroundings and our mental health.

Joyful by ingrid fetell lee