Emotion, Space and Society 40 (2021) 100811
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Emotion, Space and Society
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/emospa
Book review
Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to
Create Extraordinary Happiness, Ingrid Fetell Lee.
Rider, London (2018a). 368 pp., notes and index, £20.00
hardcover. ISBN: 9781846045394
Fetell Lee’s Joyful offers a timely exploration of how we can create
feelings of joy by making small changes to our physical surroundings. As
Fetell Lee argues: ‘Joy isn’t hard to find at all. In fact, it’s all around us’
(Fetell Lee, 2018a, p. 5). Her work elaborates on the ten components of
what she refers to as the ‘aesthetics of joy’ (Fetell Lee, 2018a, p. 8,
2018b, 2021), which create ‘a distinct connection between the feeling of
joy and the tangible qualities of the world around us’ (2018a, p. 8).
These components are: energy, abundance, freedom, harmony, play,
surprise, transcendence, magic, celebration, and renewal. She highlights
why these aesthetics are so important for sustaining the human spirit on
an individual and collective level, and how they universally evoke joy
across cultural and linguistic barriers. For instance, energy is gained
through vibrant colour and light; abundance through lushness, multi-
plicity and variety; freedom through wildness, nature and open space;
harmony through balance, symmetry and flow; play through circles,
spheres and bubbly forms; surprise through contrast; transcendence
through lightness and elevation; magic through illusions and invisible
forces; celebration through sparkle and synchrony; and renewal through
curves and blossoming (p. 8). Fetell Lee’s identification and description
of these aesthetics is backed up by the discussion of relevant papers from
the fields of psychology and neuroscience, ethnographic fieldwork to
test out design features, and interviews with notable designers who
harness joy as a key component of their creations. These explorations are
supplemented by a ‘Joyful Toolkit’, provided as an appendix (pp.
299–317), which allows readers to probe the aesthetics that are most
important to them, and how they can be accessed in everyday life.
Fetell Lee’s book calls us to move beyond cerebral musings, to
engage with the affective dimensions of our surroundings. Her thesis is
particularly effective as it goes counter to what we are told within
therapy culture – that we are supposed to seek answers from within, and
to alter ourselves through practices such as mindfulness or meditation.
Rather, we need to look outwards, to the built and physical environ-
ment, to observe its impact on us, and ultimately to adapt it so that we
create more joyful, inclusive and meaningful spaces.
Why examine the role of everyday joy in the midst of a pandemic?
Indeed, this topic is more important now than ever. There is power in
how we arrange our physical spaces, whether they be our individual
homes, or on a grander scale our workplaces or our cities, as we begin to
return to ‘normality’. Fetell Lee draws on notable examples of archi-
tecture that have been designed with joy in mind, such as Publicolor
schools in deprived areas of New York (Chapter 1: Energy, pp. 21–24),
which are painted in splashes of colour, and have greatly improved
student attendance and reduced conflict. Fetell Lee also discusses her
visit to Arakawa and Gins’s reversible destiny lofts in Mitaka, Tokyo
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2021.100811
Received 11 March 2021; Received in revised form 28 May 2021; Accepted 2 June 2021
Available online 17 June 2021
1755-4586/© 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
(Chapter 2: Abundance, pp. 46–51), which feature flowing shapes and
bouncing floors, and ‘attempt to resuscitate the childlike wonder we feel
in a world full of novel sensations’ (p. 50). Other notable examples
discussed include Antti Lovag’s Palais Bulles (Bubble Palace), a playful
house in Théoule-sur-Mer, France, designed entirely using curved shapes
and installations (Chapter 5: Play, pp. 157–163), and the role of Carnival
in bringing people together to celebrate through shared movements, and
in breaking down social stratifications (Chapter 9: Celebration, pp.
257–263). Fetell Lee’s musings are also, for instance, relevant when
examining the Jerusalema dance challenge, which has acted as a con-
nective tissue and affective site of joy for people around the world, even
in the midst of a global pandemic. However, one of the key criticisms
that could be levelled at Fetell Lee’s work is her frustrating glossing over
of the social structures that prevent people from even contemplating the
search for joy, or from interpreting certain design features as joyful. This
criticism is pertinent with regards to the themes of poverty and
sexuality.
Although Fetell Lee asserts that ‘you don’t need to buy anything
expensive to transform a space in a joyful way’ (p. 11), and further that
‘it would be naïve to think that environment by itself can remedy the
massive, systemic challenges facing poor urban communities’ (Chapter
3: Freedom, p. 84), there is little further discussion of the role of joy (if
any) in sites of deep-seated poverty, or of the specific mechanisms
involved in integrated approaches to development. Fetell Lee does
highlight that ‘poverty, imprisonment, and residence in a nursing home
are confining conditions, each with its own set of visible and invisible
boundaries’. Yet, her concluding comment – ‘In nature, we find a tem-
porary freedom from these constraints’ (p. 85) – is rather unsatisfactory.
With regards to sexuality, Fetell Lee’s commentary to a certain extent
espouses biological determinism. For instance, she discusses our pref-
erence for symmetry by drawing on evolutionary theories of sexual se-
lection, highlighting how symmetrical bodily attributes are associated
with healthy reproductive systems and thus ‘sex appeal’ (Chapter 4:
Harmony, p. 113). However, this supports capitalism’s mantra of ‘sex
sells’ and merely abets its failure to acknowledge a broader range of
sexualities, relational styles and aesthetic preferences. Furthermore, in
her discussion of curved designs in the context of Lovag’s Palais Bulles
and Pierre Cardin’s designs (Chapter 5: Play, pp. 161–162), while Fetell
Lee highlights their association with a ‘more playful incarnation of
sexuality’ (p. 161), she fails to critique Cardin’s overt association of
curved shapes with the sexualised woman’s body. Thus, her interpre-
tation plays into the hyper-eroticisation of the female body under a male
gaze. Although she does highlight the palpable joy of LGBTQIA + rallies,
which ‘always look like festivals rather than protests’ (Chapter 2:
Abundance, p. 64), and also how curves make people ‘less likely to make
discriminatory judgments about others based on stereotypes’ (Chapter
5: Play, p. 153), the above omission fails to acknowledge the potential
negative impact of design aesthetics on women, especially those of
marginalised sexual identities, when aware of the design context.
Book review
In spite of these limitations, the book offers two valuable contribu-
tions to the study of emotion, space and society. First, although not
explicitly targeted, it exposes happiness as a capitalist construction – as
an unattainable goal to which humans are supposed to aspire. Rather,
Fetell Lee highlights the power of joy as ‘an intense, momentary experience
of positive emotion’ (p. 15), that has the power to connect us deeply with
others, and to formulate a resistant strategy to capitalism’s commodi-
fications. Her work thus lends depth to Cederström’s (2018) The
Happiness Fantasy, in which he argues that happiness has been co-opted
as an individualist concept devoid of community. Fetell Lee offers a
refreshing approach, since happiness is almost always unattainable,
whereas joy can be accessed in our immediate surroundings. Second,
Fetell Lee’s book highlights the power of physical space to alter our
perceptions. Ultimately, this links to the first point, since many spaces
are deliberately designed to make us unhappy, or more specifically, to
hinder us from reaching a sense of joy. As Fetell Lee highlights, certain
shapes and textures, such as round and flowing objects, can allow our
ideas to flow freely, thus leading to creative fulfilment and political
action. When spaces are grey and sterile, as is the case with many
workplaces, our creative instincts are exhausted. As Frayne’s (2019)
recent edited volume, The Work Cure, has highlighted, this is a sad re-
ality of the neoliberal workplace, which puts the onus for unhappiness
on employees rather than the social structures and resulting environ-
ments that forge this unhappiness. While capitalism and neoliberalism
will not disappear overnight, Fetell Lee’s book offers concrete aesthetic
solutions to resist their outcomes, ultimately highlighting that ‘the drive
toward joy is synonymous with the drive toward life’ (Fetell Lee, 2018a,
p. 297).
With the possibility of pandemics becoming more frequent in the
future, it is important that we take stock of the spaces in which we live
and design them in such a way that we can find joy, as well as a sense of
shared purpose. Life is short, and perhaps one of the greatest lessons
Fetell Lee offers for our age is that there is power in finding joy in the
Emotion, Space and Society 40 (2021) 100811
everyday.
Funding
This research did not receive any specific grant from funding
agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Acknowledgements
I dedicate this book review to Octavio, Paul Panayiotou, Benjy,
Poppy, and all my animal family, who have helped me to find everyday
joy in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. I also dedicate it to our dear
friend, Pavlos Mastihi, who sadly left us during this time. Pav loved life,
lived it to the full, and captured it in all its intensity through his inspiring
photography. His message was simple: ‘you’ve only got one life, so live
it’. He lives on in all our memories, and in a memoir titled ‘The Lady and
the Octopus’, which I am currently writing.
References
Cederström, C., 2018. The Happiness Fantasy. Polity Press, Cambridge.
Fetell Lee, I., 2018b. Where Joy Hide and How to Find it. YouTube video, 11 June.
Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_u2WFTfbcg. (Accessed 10
March 2021).
Fetell Lee, I., 2021. The Aesthetics of Joy [blog]. Available at: https://aestheticsofjoy.
com. (Accessed 10 March 2021).
Frayne, D. (Ed.), 2019. The Work Cure: Critical Essays on Work and Wellness. PCCS
Books, Monmouth, UK.
Aoife Sadlier
MLA College (BAU Global Network), The Merchant, St Andrew Street,
Plymouth, PL1 2AX, Devon, United Kingdom
E-mail address: Aoife.Sadlier@mla-uk.com.