What’s the connection between color, aesthetics, and joy? Ingrid Fetell Lee discusses below.
Some highlights:
- Lee’s personal conversations led her to conclude that bubbles, treehouses, sprinkled ice cream cones, and googly eyes are consistently associated with joy.
- Things that spark joy tend to fit a consistent pattern across age, gender, and ethnicity.
- Common happiness sparks: symmetric patterns, a sense of abundance (think: confetti, rather than one confetto), roundness, undulating lines, and color.
- Students in brightly painted schools report feeling safer and have higher attendance rates.
- Employees report higher confidence and boosted mood in offices designed with the aesthetics she discovered.
The science of happiness is, itself, another thing that makes me happy. A sense of delight may well connect us to people we’ve never met.
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