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304 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2018
Ever look around a doctor's office, a school hallway, the dentist lobby, and think, something is missing here?
We should manage joy in the exact opposite way that we manage money. We should spend it all, at every chance we get.
We rediscover their joy again and again, and we fall a bit more in love each time.But, that begs the question, what makes a room joyful?
...something clicked. I saw lollipops, pompoms, and polka dots, and it dawned on me: they were all round in shape.Lee identified ten delightful categories of joy: Energy, Abundance, Freedom, Harmony, Play, Surprise, Transcendence, Magic, Celebration and Renewal - each of which has the power to transform rooms and lives.
Beige is a desaturated yellow - a yellow with all the joy sucked out of it!She goes on to describe Publicolor, a nonprofit with a goal of repainting schools fun, vibrant colors.
You have a whole world of joy right at your fingertips.YouTube | Blog | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Snapchat @miranda_reads
I'm standing next to my table, everything neatly lined up, and I'm just hoping that my professors can see how much effort I've put into making my designs practical and ergonomic and sustainable. And I'm starting to get really nervous, because for a long time, no one says anything. It's just completely silent. And then one of the professors starts to speak, and he says, "Your work gives me a feeling of joy."…I asked the professors, "How do things make us feel joy? How do tangible things make us feel intangible joy?” They hemmed and hawed and gestured a lot with their hands. "They just do," they said… So this got me thinking: Where does joy come from? I started asking everyone I knew, and even people I just met on the street, about the things that brought them joy. On the subway, in a café, on an airplane, it was, "Hi, nice to meet you. What brings you joy?" I felt like a detective. I was like, "When did you last see it? Who were you with? What color was it? Did anyone else see it?" I was the Nancy Drew of joy. - from the author’s TED talkJoyful is what she found out.
Seeing it all laid out, it was clear that joy was not a mysterious, intuitive force; it emanated directly from the physical properties of the objects. Specifically, it was what designers called aesthetics—the attributes that define the way an object looks and feels—that gave rise to the feeling of joy.She notes commonality in the joyful things she found in the world, and breaks that down to ten subject areas she labels the Aesthetics of Joy; Energy, Abundance, Freedom, Harmony, Play, Surprise, Transcendence, Magic, Celebration, and Renewal, looking at how each can be applied to improving our lives. She offers diverse, interesting, and enlightening examples from the real world of how each has been approached. While her focus is on our living and working spaces, selecting how to shape and what to put on our walls, desks, coffee tables, and mantles, to create more enriched environments, she also looks a bit at where and how you might find joy in the outside world.
A body of research is emerging that demonstrates a clear link between our surroundings and our mental health. For example, studies show that workers with sunny desks are happier and more productive than their peers in dimly lit offices.She finds in the dominant modernist minimalism architecture and internal décor of contemporary life, the places we work, the buildings in which we live, the places where we learn, or secure needed services, a soul-sucking drain on our need for joy. She sees joy as a form of sustenance, no less than food, water, light, clothing, and shelter. We need at least some joy to keep going on.
We all have an inclination to seek joy in our surroundings, yet we have been taught to ignore it. What might happen if we were to reawaken this instinct for finding joy?
Wonders never cease, as long as we are willing to look for them.
It’s not that linear time is bad. Our ability to learn from our mistakes, grow, and innovate derives from our belief that time has a forward thrust and that we can build on history to create a better future. The problem is that an overemphasis on linear time tends to magnify the pain we feel when joy ebbs. If we view the future as a blank, uncertain space, then it’s hard to trust that joy will return once it has gone. Each downswing of joy feels like a regression, each nadir like stagnation. But if instead we can rely on the repetition of certain delights at regular intervals, then the wavelike quality of joy becomes more present in our lives. Cycles create symmetry between past and future that reminds us joy will come back again.Joyful is a little hard to categorize. It isn’t a self-help or interior-design book; neither is it a stunt memoir like This Is Where You Belong: The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live and The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun, whose upbeat authors also stand back and evaluate their environments with the objective remove of a curious sociologist. But Joyful has characteristics of these sub-genres, making it helpful in a few ways and attractive to a wide audience. Fittingly titled and a joyful object itself, the book stands apart as an uplifting counterbalance to the many pessimistic and serious nonfictions overwhelming the genre. Readers would have to work hard to dislike it.