Happiness and joy are often used interchangeably, but they’re actually two very different things. Happiness is a broad evaluation of how we feel about our lives over time, says designer Ingrid Fetell Lee, and the varying degrees of happiness — the ups and downs — make happiness hard to measure. Sometimes, we're not always sure just how happy we are. But joy is much simpler and more immediate, she explains; it’s “an intense momentary experience of positive emotion.” It’s observable in direct physical expressions like smiling, laughter, and a feeling of wanting to jump up and down.

Joy carries a plethora of positive impacts. Research shows that joy helps us be up to 12 percent more productive. It increases our cognitive flexibility and strengthens our relationships. “We live in this state of burnout," says Lee, “but if we make room for small moments for joy, they can help us be more resilient over the long haul.” 

As a designer, Ingrid Fetell Lee wanted to understand the physical elements of joy. She found that things like cherry blossoms, bubbles, swimming pools, treehouses, rainbows, and rainbow sprinkles are universally joyful. The patterns she noticed became categories to organize the type of joy certain things elicit. Lee explains these different aesthetics of joy:

We all start out joyful, says Ingrid Fetell Lee. “But as we get older, being colorful or exuberant opens us up to judgment,” and we worry about “being dismissed as childish or superficial or frivolous or self-indulgent.” Give yourself permission to do what feels joyful to you, Lee says, and ask yourself, what is something I loved to do when I was younger that I stopped doing, for some reason?

“We often see joy as a distraction from success, something that we put off to our nights and our weekends because it doesn’t belong in the workplace, when in fact joy can be a catalyst for our success,” says Lee. Though it can be tempting to postpone joy during stressful times at work, it is ultimately one of our best tools to restore well-being.

“We have a massive untapped opportunity to use our spaces in ways that can help people thrive,” argues Ingrid Fetell Lee. The lack of joyful design is most extreme in the places that house the people who are most vulnerable in our society, she says — places like schools, hospitals, nursing homes, and jails. Lee discusses a city in Albania and a youth development program in New York CIty that are making radical changes to their communities through simple pops of color:

Our physical surroundings can help us cultivate happier and healthier lives, both individually and socially — but at the same time they can be used to further marginalize people who are vulnerable. “This is an emerging public health issue and public health opportunity,” says Lee, and one that deserves attention.

A simple way to be more attuned to joy is what Ingrid Fetell Lee calls joyspotting, or noticing all the tiny joyful things in the environment immediately around us. For more joyful relationships, Lee emphasizes the importance of sharing joy and celebrating our partner’s joy with them. In designing living and working spaces, she suggests “joy is a palette we can work with” for “finding the right aesthetics for the right environment.”

Joy is often the first thing to go when we’re stressed or experiencing a crisis. “If you feel yourself entering a mode of chronic stress, where it’s relentless, it’s very easy to dig in and say, I just have to get to the other side,” Lee points out. “That’s a good trigger to say, I should do some small and joyful thing now.”