Healthcare Design - December 2018 - 18

KEYNOTES
18

DECEMBER 2018

Drive toward joy

THE 2018 HEALTHCARE Design Expo & Conference began with a message of joy.
Opening keynote speaker Ingrid Fetell Lee,
designer and founder of The Aesthetics of Joy,
author, and former design director at Ideo, took
to the stage to talk about the importance of joy in
our everyday lives and how essential that feeling
can be to health and well-being.
Lee's journey to researching the emotion began in design school after a professor remarked
during her first-year review that
her work gave him a feeling of
joy, but he couldn't specify how
or why. She began researching
the idea of joy, discovering an
emerging body of research that
demonstrates a link between our
environment and our emotional
well-being. "Joy and happiness
are used interchangeably, but
scientists describe it as a momentary experience of positive emotion. It's different from happiness, which is how we feel over
time," she said.
As her interest in the subject deepened, she
began to identify objects, shapes, and colors that
produced feelings of joy, such as bubbles, trees,
swimming pools, and rainbows, realizing that
these things cut across age, gender, and ethnicity. Through symmetrical shapes, pops of color,
and repeating patterns, Lee said she realized that,
though the feeling of joy is mysterious and elusive, people can access it through tangible attributes-or what designers call "aesthetics."
Lee began identifying different kinds of joy,
with names for the sensations they elicit, noting 10 aesthetics of joy that relate to the world
around us. (She even began to call this process
"joy-spotting.") As she focused more on the
things that bring people joy, she says she began
to realize that the places where joy was needed

Some objects,
shapes,
and colors
universally
produce
feelings of joy.

most-hospitals, housing shelters, nursing
homes, and schools-were often lacking in elements such as contrast, pattern, and color that
create the feeling.
"When we see color, it's a sign of energy, a sign
of life," said Lee. "But in healthcare environments, we don't see energizing color very often,"
except in the children's wings of hospitals where
it's permissible to use vibrant color, she added.
Challenging the audience to consider the role
of aesthetics in healing, Lee suggested ways to
bring joy into healthcare environments, including creating a feeling of liberation, abundance,
and light and color. For example, light is critical
to our well-being and plays a role in making us
more active. Lee cited research that showed that
people who are exposed to more light, both natural and artificial, are more physically active during the day and sleep better at night. "Find ways
to bring healthy light into our everyday experiences," Lee said.
On the topic of abundance, she shared the case
study of a senior living community that hung
numerous colorful spheres above a seating area
in the visiting area. The result: families visited
together longer. "Moments of joy influence our
interactions and engagements," she said.
However, Lee also noted that concerns about
cost, fear of causing harm, and aversion to risk
have created barriers to including such joyful
aesthetics in design, driving home a message
that such elements are trivial and not essential.
"We need more evidence on how these things
help," she said.
In closing, Lee reminded the audience that the
impulse toward joy is something that we all have.
"Deep within us, we all have a desire to seek out
joy in our surroundings and we have [that desire]
for a reason," she said. "Joy isn't just a superfluous extra, it's fundamentally connected to our
deeper instincts for survival. On the most basic
level, the drive toward joy is the drive toward
life."-Shandi Matambanadzo, managing editor

Healthcare Design - December 2018

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