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 conscious appraisal of how good our life is and it often includes a
range of different factors how could we feel about our work or how 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 right 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 to find joy is as an intense momentary experience of
positive emotion and the way that we measure that is through actual physical
expressions 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 could we feel over time joy
is about feeling good in the moment I'm going to talk through the 10 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 since surreal patterns in the
things that emerged so these 10 aesthetics of joy each one is it 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
that'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 you know when our ancestors were sort
of roaming the savannas and looking for good places to settle often it was a
sense of lushness in their surroundings and
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 is orderly and organized around us energy is the
aesthetic of color and light and it explains why we have an innate
attraction to a sense of brightness around us so we often use the terms we
often use brightness and darkness as a proxy for our emotions we say that life
is golden when things are going well or if we are in a bad mood we have a dark
cloud hanging over us well it turns out this spectrum of brightness to darkness
is a universal thing and that bright colors are universally understood to be
joyful we find joy in experiences of freedom the feeling of being let loose
and are having our bodies be unbounded so that feeling of when you were kid and
on the last day of the school the school doors burst open and you you know could
burst out onto the playground that's a feeling of freedom but also the feeling
of being in a wide-open meadow and having space around us often nature is
the thing that gives us a feeling of freedom now because we live in sort of
enclosed into our environments and when we're sort of let out into nature and
when we bring those natural elements inside we can find that feeling of
freedom in our day-to-day lives this is that it came out of an observation that
I made while I was looking at all of these different objects that people told
me were joyful and I started looking at all the objects of
childhood things like hula hoops and bubbles and balloons and bouncy balls
and merry-go-rounds and carousels and I notice that they're all round and I
started to wonder why are so many things that are playful round well it turns out
that round shapes are the safest shapes they don't risk injury and so they make
it easy to play with them and they can also be used in the greatest variety of
ways they have the broadest affordances which is a term designers use to
describe the different ways that things can be used and so round shapes are
naturally associated with play surprise is the aesthetic of contrast and whimsy
and a classic example of surprise occurred to me when one day when I was
at a business meeting it was really early on in my career I was very
stressed out I was about to give a big presentation and I was so anxious I
thought I might fall over and I looked down and I saw at the feet of the
executive next to me a pair of rainbow striped socks and he was the serious
buttoned up executive and yet hiding under there was this joyful playful
thing and it set me at ease and that's what surprise does it catches our
attention it's incongruous and it calls our
attention to two things that we might miss otherwise in our surroundings
transcendence is the aesthetic that explains the joy we find in hot-air
balloons and treehouses and hummingbirds things that float and fly in the air
things that draw our eyes upward in space magic is the aesthetic of things
that we can't quite put our finger on things that we can't quite grasp it
involves mysterious movements and lights that shimmer and shift things like
fireflies or the swirling iridescent on the edge of a bubble or in an oily
puddle those kinds of things feel between worlds right we can't quite put
our finger on them and they create a feeling not only of joy but of wonder
and this feeling often creates curiosity within us it sort of leads us toward new
discoveries renewal is this of growth and change and it reflects the
kind of dynamism that we hope to see in our own lives this feeling of movement
and progress around us so it explains the attraction we find to shapes that
feel expansive like the opening of a flower spirals the way that spirals
reflect the way that plants tend to grow so this aesthetic really brings to life
that feeling of growth and potential and change that we find in our surroundings
joy is a highly contagious emotion it's something that spreads easily between
people and celebration is the aesthetic that explains how joy spreads between
people when we want to amplify our joy when we're in a moment of coming
together in celebration we want our joy to be as contagious as possible and so
we use things like fireworks that burst open we use sparkle we use glitter and
and confetti and things that sort of feel almost effervescent and we use
those elements to amplify the sense of joy we feel in a celebratory moment I
think it's interesting because as a culture were obsessed with the pursuit
of happiness and we often attach the idea of
happiness to big things happening in our lives so getting married or finding the
right job or having children or grandchildren and we think that these
things are going to make us happy and that can often make happiness feel kind
of elusive because many of the factors involved are out of our control
whereas joy is much it's much easier to access because it's visceral we always
know if we're feeling joy when we feel it and it's measured in these small
moments and so instead of focusing on a lot of these things that are out of our
control when we focus on joy we can focus on creating more of those smaller
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