Author: Emily Ludolph / Source: 99U by Behance
In her new book ‘Joyful’, author and IDEO Fellow Ingrid Fetell Lee embraces color, abundance and bubbles. And you should too.
IDEO Fellow Ingrid Fetell Lee is a purveyor of joy. Not just with her buoyant personality and quickdraw collection of delightful stories.
Her blog, The Aesthetics of Joy, collects the sights, sounds, sunflowers, and playground slides that can brighten a room, buoy a mood, and reinvigorate a community.Now, Fetell Lee has curated that project into a book, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness. In each chapter, Fetell Lee explores delight-inducing characteristics like abundance, harmony, and surprise and the creatives who have prioritized the benefits of joyful aesthetics in their homes, work, and communities.
99U sat down with Fetell Lee to talk about the origins of Joyful, how aesthetics impact our work performance, and how you’ve been thinking about your favorite color all wrong.
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The Aesthetics of Joy started while you were a grad student at Pratt. What was the origin of the project?
I went into Pratt with very serious intentions. I was volunteering with a nonprofit that worked to prevent roadside injuries among children in Africa and I designed low cost reflective backpacks with them. That was the sort of stuff I was interested in. So, there was this moment of cognitive dissonance when, a year into the Pratt program, a professor said to me, “Your work gives me a feeling of joy.” And I was like “What? That wasn’t what I was going for.” Joy seemed so light and fluffy. It took a while for me to come around to the understanding that joy could be quite serious in its impact.
There’s an emerging body of research that shows that our surroundings have a profound influence on our well-being and performance.
How can joy be serious in impact?
We think of aesthetics as frivolous or superfluous. We’re inculcated with the view that this isn’t really what matters in life. But, these aesthetics of joy have deep effects. There’s an emerging body of research that shows that our surroundings have a profound influence on our well-being and performance. A reader recently sent me an example of confetti dots for kindness. They started in a classroom and each dot is a kind act that someone did. Now the whole hallway is covered in confetti. It’s a way to visualize the kindness of the community in an aesthetically joyful way. It spreads that visceral, unconscious experience to everyone in the…
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