Hey There!
Many of my friends, like me, choose to live, visit and spend time in cities. They know they love walkable, urban environments, but they find it difficult to express what exactly makes the experience special. In reality, there are many layers of physical attributes, design, sensations and activity that contribute to a great place. Research shows that we find joy in external environments that reflect complexity similar to our own intricate personalities. Therefore, design can be a powerful means to generate happiness.
As an urban designer, I am passionate about creating walkable, sustainable communities by way of physical placemaking. Based on my experience, people form attachments to places that they love, and contribute to the viability of loved places by reinvesting in them over time. Inspired by Ingrid Fetell Lee's TED2018 Where Joy Hides and How to Find It, I have found a strong desire to understand why or how people form attachments. It must be a feeling of joy and cumulatively happiness. As Ingrid describes, joy is an intense, momentary instance of positive emotion. It gives us a feeling of wanting to smile, laugh or jump up and down. In contrast, happiness is feeling good over time. We all have an impulse to find joy in the physical world around us which is directly connected to our mental health. Ingrid goes on to illustrate that joy hides in plain sight and that physical, tangible elements can trigger intangible joy.
This blog is an opportunity to provide a qualitative analysis of joyful elements in the public realm. It is hard to discuss every factor in one post. As such, each post will focus on evaluating one joyful component based on the following themes, distilled by The Aesthetics of Joy: energy, abundance, freedom, harmony, play, surprise, transcendence, magic, celebration and renewal; while always keeping in mind that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The themes are expressed through stories, photographs and drawings. In addition to the topic, the posts examine how drawing style and color can impact our happiness.
