Ingrid Fetell Lee

When I saw it this way, I realized that the feeling of joy is mysterious and elusive.

We can access it through tangible, physical attributes, or what designers call aesthetics, a word that comes from the same root as the Greek word eisenomai, which means, I feel, I sense, I perceive.

And since these patterns were telling me that joy begins with the senses, I began calling them aesthetics of joy, the sensations of joy.

And in the wake of this discovery, I noticed something, that as I walked around, I began spotting little moments of joy everywhere I went.

A vintage yellow car or a clever piece of street art.

It was like I had a pair of rose-colored glasses.

And now that I knew what to look for, I was seeing it everywhere.

It was like these little moments of joy were hidden in plain sight.

And at the same time, I had another realization, that if these are the things that bring us joy, then why does so much of the world look like this?

Why do we go to work here?

Why do we send our kids to schools that look like this?

And this is most acute for the places that house the people that are most vulnerable among us.

Nursing homes, hospitals, homeless shelters,

housing projects.

We all start out joyful, but as we get older, being colorful or exuberant opens us up to judgment.

Adults who exhibit genuine joy are often dismissed as childish or too feminine or unserious or self-indulgent.

And so we hold ourselves back from joy,

But if the aesthetics of joy can be used to help us find more joy in the world around us, then couldn't they also be used to create more joy?

I spent the last two years scouring the planet, looking for different ways that people have answered this question.

And this led me to the work of the artist Arakawa and the poet Madeleine Ginns, who believed that these kinds of environments are literally killing us.