Managers who are more joyful have teams that complete their tasks with less effort. Studies show that we’re more productive in a state of joy. We feel like we have to do something to deserve it, but in fact, that relationship is flipped: When we allow ourselves moments of joy, we become more successful and resilient. Ingrid Fetell Lee | We tend to think of joy as a reward - something we get to have on weekends. Why is it important to reawaken that instinct? “I began to see the world as a reservoir of positivity that I could turn to at any time.”Įxperience Life | You write in Joyful that we impulsively seek joy in our surroundings but we’ve been taught to ignore it. “As I delved deeper into these findings, joy started to become less amorphous and abstract to me and more tangible and real,” she writes. While Joyful might inspire you to consider your home design in a new light, the connection between object and emotion that Lee’s work reveals can extend far beyond your own domicile, reverberating out into your community and public spaces. Do bubbles, polka dots, and balloons make you smile? Along with other circles and spherical things, they fall under the play aesthetic. This can partly explain the delight Lee feels when her eye lands on her color-coded bookshelves. For example, the harmony aesthetic includes objects that offer a sense of balance and symmetry. The book is organized around Lee’s 10 aesthetics of joy - pleasurable qualities that tend to cut across lines of age, gender, and ethnicity. “It’s an intense momentary experience of positive emotion, one that you really feel in your body: It makes you smile or laugh, or it gives you that feeling of wanting to jump up and down.” “Happiness is more of a broad evaluation of how we feel about our lives over time, whereas joy is much simpler and more immediate,” Lee explains. The book draws on neuroscience, psychology, and Lee’s own excursions - including trips to a treehouse bed-and-breakfast in Washington, a hot-air-balloon festival in New Mexico, and a “reversible destiny loft” in Mitaka, Japan - to explore how we can design our surroundings to inspire more daily cheer.Ĭrucially, joy is different from happiness.

That question ultimately led Lee to write Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness. “Because then, as a designer, that’s something I can replicate. I guess I didn’t fail.”īut how could these physical artifacts evoke an emotional response? “I really wanted to understand what happens in my brain when I look at something that makes me feel joy,” she says. “I thought, Well, that’s weird,” she recalls. It was her first review in the Pratt Institute’s industrial-design program, and she’d presented an assortment of everyday objects: a lamp, a stool, a small cup. When Ingrid Fetell Lee’s academic advisors remarked that her work inspired a feeling of joy, she wasn’t quite sure what to think.

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