“Sometimes they had round shapes, or bright colours, or a sense of abundance and multiplicity, or sometimes symmetry and harmony - that’s what became the esthetics of joy.” “I just started arranging them and rearranging them and realized there were attributes common to many of these things,” she says. She started to make a wall of images in her studio, wondering what these things, things that cross age, gender and ethnicity, might have in common, why fireworks or swimming pools or ice cream cones with sprinkles, for instance, brought joy.
She noticed that certain things, such as cherry blossoms, bright colours, balloons and butterflies, created a feeling of joy. “I thought, I don’t want to be a graphic designer or fashion designer, but industrial design, product design, that’s the right space for me.”įetell Lee returned to graduate school to study design and ponder the question: could simple objects, material things, bring meaningful joy? This launched a 10-year journey into the exploration of joy. Then she started to look at different fields of design.
So, when graduated from college, she worked in marketing and, as the design director at IDEO, led teams of designers to create products and services for clients like American Express, Condé Nast and PepsiCo. “She was really a big influence, but I had no idea that there were careers that drew from that.” “We would come home with a bunch of supplies, and they would let me play with whatever I was interested in at that moment,” she says. Every summer, Fetell Lee would spend a month with her grandparents where they would go to the craft store. Her parents were doctors, and that’s where the science side of her comes in - but she did grow up in a creative family: her grandmother was a milliner and she taught Fetell Lee a lot of crafts like quilting, knitting and sewing. I wanted to make things and would always come up with crazy ideas for inventions,” says Fetell Lee. “When I was a kid, I said I wanted to be an inventor. To be fair, she didn’t even know that design was something one could do.
It wasn’t as if Ingrid Fetell Lee was drawn to design as a child. Lend an ear and bring a little more joy into your life. Seventeen million people have tuned in to hear her TED Talk, “Where Joy Hides and How to Find It,” and listening to her is an aha moment.
As the author of Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness and the founder of the popular website The Aesthetics of Joy, Ingrid Fetell Lee is trying hard to help people find more joy in life and work through design.
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