Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness. With Ingrid Fetell Lee
Dec 31, 2024
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Ingrid Fetell Lee, a designer and researcher, discusses her book on how ordinary things can spark extraordinary happiness. She delves into the science behind joy, revealing how colors, shapes, and spaces affect our well-being. Ingrid shares insights on vibrant design elements that foster emotional health and the importance of creating joyful environments. She emphasizes the joy found in simple pleasures and communal celebrations, encouraging listeners to embrace positivity even amidst life's challenges.
Ingrid Fetell Lee distinguishes joy from happiness by defining joy as an immediate emotion influenced by our environments and perceptions.
The podcast highlights ten design principles, like energy and surprise, that can be incorporated into our spaces to cultivate everyday joy.
Deep dives
Understanding the Science of Joy
Ingrid Fattel-Lee defines joy as an immediate and intense positive emotion, contrasting it with happiness, which reflects a long-term assessment of life satisfaction. Fattel-Lee’s exploration into joy began unexpectedly during her industrial design studies when a professor remarked that her designs evoked joy. This prompted her to investigate how our surroundings can influence our feelings of joy and happiness over the past 15 years. By examining multiple perspectives, from personal experiences to universal attributes, she emphasizes that joy is accessible at any moment, regardless of life’s broader challenges.
The Three Levels of Joy
Fattel-Lee identifies three distinct levels of joy—personal, cultural, and universal. Personal joy stems from unique individual experiences, such as cherished memories tied to specific objects, while cultural joy connects to shared experiences like favorite foods or team victories. Universally joyful experiences, however, share common traits that transcend age, gender, and ethnicity, tied to our evolutionary history, such as an affinity for bright colors signaling energy and life. This multi-faceted understanding allows individuals to tap into joy from various sources in their environments.
The Influence of Environment on Well-Being
The physical environment plays a crucial role in fostering joy and emotional well-being. Fattel-Lee notes that aspects like color, texture, and spatial arrangement influence our subconscious reactions, impacting anxiety and happiness levels. For instance, aesthetically stimulating environments, such as colorful nursing homes, can combat monotony and increase residents’ happiness. By cultivating varied and engaging spaces, individuals can significantly enhance their overall mental health and emotional resilience.
Joyful Design Principles
Fattel-Lee outlines ten design principles that contribute to creating joyful spaces: energy, abundance, freedom, harmony, play, surprise, transcendence, magic, celebration, and renewal. Each principle embodies distinct elements—like the use of color for energy or the joy of open spaces for freedom—that can be incorporated into everyday life. Practical applications include introducing playful shapes, meaningful decorations, or light-filled environments that evoke a sense of wonder and possibility. Embracing these principles fosters a joyful atmosphere that promotes well-being and happiness.
In this New Year's episode, we sit down with Ingrid Fetell Lee, the author of Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness. Ingrid, a designer and researcher, shares the science of joy, and does a deep dive into how our surroundings impact our well-being AND how we can harness the power of color, shape, and space to actually cultivate more happiness in our lives. We explore the intersection of design, psychology, and emotion, as well as practical ways to create more joy in our everyday environments. She shares how small, simple things can often have a huge impact on how we feel and how we experience the world.
As always, we’re Untangle, the podcast from Muse, the brain sensing headband dedicated to unlocking your brains potential AND Meditation Studio the five star app. Unlock 30 days of Meditation Studio for free at choosemuse.com/meditationstudio.