Is there an equation? If you have more moments of joy does it equal bigger happiness? While we can’t manufacture happiness, because that’s too big, we can create one more moment-a few more moments-of joy in a day. Understanding that you can do specific things to create the conditions for it, to make it more likely to appear or occur gives people a sense of agency. When I was younger I felt that joy came and went and you had no control over it. The idea that we don’t just have to wait for joy to happen, but that we can create the conditions for it-that’s the important distinction. I love the idea of creating the conditions for joy to happen. Can you literally manufacture joy? I don’t know, but I think it might just be semantics. Ingrid Fetell Lee Create joy, bring joy, produce joy, give joy.how do you prefer to talk about joy, in the active or passive tense? Are we capable of creating joy or does it just happen if we set ourselves up for it? It made me think that psychology had really been overlooking these ideas. I found out that our surroundings do influence our emotions, sometimes to such a profound degree that they can influence serious conditions like depression and anxiety. The professors couldn’t tell me why that would be the case, so I started researching it. This was the moment when I realized maybe that stuff is more important than I thought. As a designer, I’d always been attracted to certain kinds of things-colorful things, vibrant things-and I’d always thought that was sort of shallow and superficial. It’s really important to do the work of getting to know yourself and understand what’s going on inside.īut when I was in grad school for industrial design and during a review my professor said that my work gave him a feeling of joy, it was like a light bulb flashed for me. It’s not that I think those ideas aren’t valid and valuable. I was raised to believe that physical things are not that important-we’re not supposed to care too much about them and that what really matters comes from the inside. What made you think there could be more to the idea that real joy can come from your environment? There are so many philosophies that assert joy comes from within-words like mindfulness and meditation are liberally used. In advance of her live discussion with our CEO Susan Tynan in DC on July 30, we spoke with Ingrid about her book and approach to a more joyful life. Drawing on her own experiences as well as insights from neuroscience and psychology research, she presents 10 aesthetics that have the potential to bring moments of profound joy. In her book, Joyful, the author and designer challenges the idea that true joy can only come from within. Joy could be right in front of you! According to Ingrid Fetell Lee, the things that are physically around us have not been given enough credit when it comes to joy-bringing.

Joy ingrid fetell lee