Design hack: 10 joy-inducing aesthetics you should know | Ingrid Fetell Lee | Big Think

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Design hack: 10 joy-inducing aesthetics you should know Watch the newest video from Big Think: https://bigth.ink/NewVideo Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos: https://bigth.ink/Edge ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joy and happiness are often used synonymously, but designer Ingrid Fetell Lee argues that there is an important distinction between the two: time. Happiness is something that measures how good we feel over time, while joy is about feeling good in the moment. Noticing visual and sensorial patterns in the things that brought people joy, Lee was able to identify 10 ""aesthetics"": abundance, harmony, energy, freedom, play, surprise, transcendence, magic, renewal, and celebration. In this video, we learn more about each aesthetic and why focusing on joyful moments is the key to getting the most out of life. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- INGRID FETELL LEE: Ingrid Fetell Lee is a former Design Director at global innovation firm IDEO and founder of the blog The Aesthetics of Joy, a leading resource in the field of emotional design. With over a decade of experience in design and branding, she holds an MA in Industrial Design from Pratt Institute and a BA in English and Creative Writing from Princeton University. Check Ingrid Fetell Lee's latest book Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness at https://amzn.to/39ZgXm4 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TRANSCRIPT: INGRID FETELL LEE: I think happiness and joy often get confused, especially in popular culture, and we often hear the words joy and happiness and positivity kind of all get mixed up. But happiness is something that psychologists measure over time. So it's more of a conscience appraisal of how good our life is and it often includes a range of different factors. How good we feel about our work or the quality of our relationships or whether we feel like we have a sense of purpose. All of those things go into our feeling of happiness. And it can be kind of complicated. Sometimes we don't even know if we feel happy. Whereas joy is a lot simpler and more immediate. So a way that I define joy and a lot of psychologists define joy as an intense momentary experience of positive emotion. And the way that we measure that is through actual physical expression. So smiling, laughing and the feeling of wanting to jump up and down. These are some of the different ways that psychologists measure joy. So whereas happiness is something that measures how good we feel over time, joy is about feeling good in the moment. I'm going to talk through the ten different aesthetics of joy and as I talk about these you may find that some of them sound really familiar to you. When I started asking people about the things that brought them joy and I started hearing certain things over and over again. I noticed that there were certain visual and sensorial patterns in the things that emerged. So these ten aesthetics of joy each one is one of those patterns. And they connect the physical world around us to the emotional world within us. Abundance is the kid in a candy store aesthetic. So we often say that when we feel a sense of joy it's like our cup runneth over. It's almost like the feeling is so good it sort of bursts out beyond the boundaries of our bodies. And that feeling of abundance also ties to a feeling of abundance in our surroundings. So when our ancestors were sort of roaming the savannahs and looking for good places to settle often it was a sense of lushness in their surroundings, a sense of abundance that told them that this would be a good and a safe place to be. And so we still rely on a sense of abundance which we can find in things like polka dots and stripes and multicolor or rainbow color palettes. And those things give us this feeling of abundance. If you're someone who finds joy in a really well organized closet or in a collection of things that are arranged neatly, harmony is the aesthetic for you. And this is the aesthetic of balance and symmetry and pattern. And it comes from the fact that seeing order in the world around us often gives us a sense of joy and calm. It lets our brains relax because we know that we can spot threats or opportunities because the rest of the world is orderly and organized around us. Energy is the aesthetic of color and light and it explains why we have an innate attraction... Read the full transcript at https://bigthink.com/videos/joy-aesthetics