Were the fantastical plots by Lewis Carroll (a.k.a. Charles Dodgson) in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland a playful way of attacking new ideas in mathematics? This piece by Melanie Bayley in the New York Times gave me a sense of amazement and delight. She suggests that Alice’s rapid changes in size and proportion are a satire of mathematician Augustus De Morgan’s purely symbolic system of algebra, while the Mad Hatter’s tea party is stuck in time because the characters are obeying the principles of William Rowan Hamilton’s principles of “pure time.”
If this is true, it puts a wonderful new lens on one of my favorite joyful books. To visualize mathematical concepts and properties through the behavior of characters is such a clever way to make these ideas accessible, and to expose both their appeal and their absurdity. It’s an ingenious way of adding a layer of emotion to rational concepts, infusing a dry academic debate with charm and relevance.
Recently, the website Science and Religion Today invited me to answer an intriguing question: what architecture or design works best for places of worship? I shared a few thoughts with them on aesthetic elements that tend to put people in a spiritual frame of mood, regardless of religion. Read my answer here.
What is your favorite place for spiritual communion? Why? I would love to hear your thoughts.
Image: Osaka’s Church of Light, designed by Tadao Ando. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Artist Pete Dungey says of his Pothole Gardens, “If we planted one of those in every hole, it would be like a forest in the road.” Indeed. And a gorgeous, surprising example of urban renewal and joyful activism.
This whimsical series of photos by Jan von Holleben has me totally charmed. There’s something so sweet about the landlocked restaging of childhood fantasies of flight: Peter Pan, Superman, The Red Balloon, etc. It looks like it would be such fun to be one of the kids in the photos. It also highlights a connection I hadn’t noticed before — the link between childhood and a fascination with flight.
So many characters in children’s stories fly: superheroes, fairies, wizards. Many toys fly as well, from balloons to paper airplanes, kites to whirlygigs. There’s something enchanting, liberating about flight and I wonder if children are more fixated on flight or just less inhibited about imagining it. As we get older, the characters in our stories tend to keep their feet more firmly on the ground, and even our dreams seem to have less flying in them, or at least that is the case for me. As a child I used to spend many nights leaping through the air in REM sleep; now, I covet a dream where I even get a few feet off the ground.
It’s also interesting to me how these photos illustrate the joyful gestures of flying. If we take away the props and the settings, what’s left are splayed-out, arms-up gestures that stretch the body wide and open. With no context, you could still understand the form as those of bodies in flight. There is an exultant quality to these bodily shapes; they are delight in contour, revelry in sinew. Joy thrives in this unthreatened openness, this delicious expansion of a physical being into its space. It makes me wonder how we might incorporate more of these kinds of gestures, in stills or in movements, into everyday life.
Really liking the colorful flatness of these spreads from Fireworks, by Mike Mills, plus one last set of rainbows (from his 2008 installation in Milan) to round out the day.
This looks like a delicious dessert for a spring day. Maybe something to eat when you’re wandering around Wuppertal…
And maybe if you were carrying…
On such a colorful day, you might run into someone like this:
And then if you got tired, you’d come home and take a seat:
My files are full of these joyful, colorful images that have caught my eye at one point or another. I save them up in folders with names like spirals and candy and things that look like ice cream. Then I forget what I put in them, and sometimes when I go in and open them up they are like little presents. This is the contents of my rainbows folder, now emptied out so I can start gathering anew!
Top to bottom: Rainbow jello, via DailyCandy; Holsteiner stairs in Wuppertal, by Horst Gläsker; Bolsaco by SuTurno; Photo by Paul Smith, posted on his (maddeningly non-permalinked) blog 13 August 09; Paper-wood stool by Drill Design.
ps: I love how Paul Smith describes his photo, above. He says, “this man is also a shop,” which is such a lovely window into his view of retailing. If you’ve ever walked through one of his whimsical, eclectic shops, you can immediately see the connection to this image, and the notion that selling is secondary to the pleasure of being among (and creating) arrangements of delightful things.
Someone recently pointed out to me that images were not showing up in the site’s feed. If you are a regular reader then you know that this blog is all about the images, so this was not a good thing! Fortunately, I managed to figure out the problem and get it fixed. Soooo if you’d prefer to get AoJ in a reader but have been frustrated in the past by the lack of eye candy, feel free to try it again and please let me know if you have any problems.
I am a big fan of snow. I know it’s inconvenient. I know it piles up in big drifts that make it hard to get around. I know you have to shovel it within 4 hours in Brooklyn or you’ll get a ticket. I know it looks pristine for about 30 seconds in the city and then it turns poo-brown and ugly. I know all this but there’s really nothing you could say that would make me love snow any less.
My first reaction to snow is always a visceral call to memories of childhood joy: “Snowday!” Just the barest snippet of a winter weather forecast or a “storm warning” brings a rush of delight. As a child, a forecast of snow meant I immediately put down the books and pencils and stopped doing my homework, and started dreaming of sledding and hot chocolate and the general indolence of a holiday in the middle of the week. Occasionally the snow failed to materialize, and I was on my way to school with a pack full of unlearned knowledge and bad excuses. But usually the comforting voice of the local radio announcer would announce my school closed along with my best friend’s, and we would grab our matching orange plastic sleds and head for the hills. As an adult, I see snow, and I turn right back into this little girl (in the red, on the left):
There’s a personal joy for me in those memories — in having them and sharing them. But I think there’s a deeper, more profound joy to be found here, one that is more universal because it derives from the aesthetic experience of snow. There’s something magical about snow, the way it drops from the sky with the lightness of cotton, and yet rests so heavy on the earth. There’s a sense of awe created too, by the extent of its scale, both macro and micro: snow covers everything, quickly and indiscriminately, and yet miraculously, because the scale of each flake is so diminutive.
These are common joyful elements that I have written about before, but looking at the commonalities illuminates the many facets of snow’s delight. With its lightness, snow is like bubbles, feathers, dandelion seeds, marshmallows, and meringue — transcendent things that are made of and at home in the air. With its scale, snow can be like the ocean, the redwoods, or the Grand Canyon — awe-inspiring in its vastness. And yet, as tiny things, snowflakes are like jewels, like haikus, and like hobbyist’s miniatures — joyful things made precious by the intricacy they possess in such small scale. Snow’s magic is the magic of invisible sources, of something from nothing. A snowfall is a slow-unfolding abracadabra moment of a rabbit being pulled from a hat, an extended display of the tangible emerging from the intangible as it blows and accumulates into drifts.
Underlying all of this, for me, is a kind of joy of transformation. Snow is itself a shapeshifter, first light, then heavy; small, then large. It is moldable, a substrate for transient sculpture, be it snowman or snowangel, or merely a snowweapon in the form of an icicle or a ball. But more significant is what snow does to what’s around it. In this sense, snow is an intrusion, a new element that transforms its context by its presence. Snow’s intrusion into a city is all-encompassing. Snow’s color and texture redefine the setting. Its volume and density redefine the action. It blankets, it bleaches, and it slows. Snow changes our behavior; it gives us permission to be more playful. And snow changes the feeling of even indoor spaces, making them more intimate and cozy.
The pleasure of this transformation is heightened because we know it won’t last. Days, sometimes weeks, after the first magic act of its appearance, snow performs a second one, disappearing into what seems like nothing. We revel in it because we know it’s an evanescent joy. And we’re not sorry to see it go because we know that like all true delights, it will come again.
Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home…. Maybe it is a good things for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always later, so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it. For a house that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to the house we were born in, would lead to thoughts—serious, sad thoughts—and not to dreams. It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.
I’ve been dreaming about this house, on the island of Elliðaey in Iceland, since I saw it here. Apparently the house was a gift from the government of Iceland to singer Bjork for raising the country’s global profile. Then I saw this quote by Bachelard and started to feel a little better about the fact that I don’t live in it. I may never get to live in anything quite as remarkable as this, but I find great joy in the houses of my daydreams, and it makes me wonder if sometimes there isn’t as much joy in desiring as possessing.
Spotted this installation near the corner of 33rd and Lex a few weeks ago. Despite the bitter cold, people kept stopping to play. Does anyone know whose work this is?
My latest post for my Psychology Today blog is generating a lot of great discussion in the comments about architecture and emotion. The post uses the phenomenon of the blog Unhappy Hipsters, which assigns new captions to photos from Dwell and other design magazines, as a springboard for questioning the emotions evoked by modern design aesthetics. I argue that there are ways in which modernism is fundamentally in tension with the aesthetics of joy, particularly when it comes to angular forms, desaturated color palettes, and minimalist or restrained tendencies. Though it sounds as if I’m a modernist-hater from the premise, if you’re a regular reader you know that’s not the case. In fact, I’ve posted on the opposite topic — confluences between modernism and joy — more than once before. The post was inspired by the old adage, “it’s funny because it’s true.” I was curious if the humor in Unhappy Hipsters stemmed from a larger, mainly unconscious issue with modern design. The post was an attempt to provoke some reflection on some of the salient features of the style/ideology of modernism and why they might be at odds with positive affect. I’m heartened to see the level of debate and thought in the discussion, and I’d love to hear your thoughts as well.
Fascinating piece by Daniel B. Smith in Sunday’s NYT magazine about the emerging field of ecopsychology, which studies the relationship between the health of the natural world and that of the mind. The field views mental health more broadly than any preceding branch of psychology, suggesting that our sanity is inextricable from the vitality of our surroundings and the strength of our connection to them.
This makes intuitive sense to me. After all, our physical health is deeply dependent on the health of our immediate environment. Perhaps before the Industrial Revolution we could have conceived of our bodies as separate entities, impermeable to pollution. But now we know that chemicals in our waterways end up in our veins and that smog chokes our lungs as much as our visibility. The link between environmental soundness and mind is less apparent, but still plausible. If we evolved for an environment filled with the aesthetics of lush, green life, but we live in an environment that deprives us of these aesthetics, isn’t it possible that this state of being becomes like a nutritional deficit of the mind? That robbing our environment of certain essential stimuli decreases mental performance and makes us not only less happy but also less functional?
There are already disorders recognized to have a relationship to the stimuli we take in from our environment. The appropriately named SAD (seasonal affective disorder) is a kind of depression related to the low levels of available light in winter. SAD is worst at higher latitudes where the light difference between seasons is most extreme. Yet some Scandinavian peoples, such as Icelanders, have been found to have an immunity to this condition, perhaps because it was selected as a favorable survival condition by evolution. This is only one data point, but it suggests to me that people may evolve for certain environments, that our brains may be subtly wired through generations of interactions with a place, and that the rapid rate of change (/devastation) of those places could be a latent source of emotional trauma.
Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht terms this trauma solastalgia, which combines the Latin solacium, meaning comfort, and the Greek root -algia, meaning pain. He defines his coinage as “the pain experienced when there is a recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault…a form of homesickness one gets one when is still at ‘home.’ ” It’s an instantly evocative word to match an evocative concept (though perhaps not so precise — I can think of lots of cases of comfort-pain that have nothing to do with place). Smith notes that the word has spread rapidly, not just in academic or journalistic circles, but as a title for songs and works of art. The idea of defending our land as a people is nothing new, but throughout history usually it is from invasion, and what we are defending is livelihood — the resources for living and the livelihood we have created in a place. This goes much deeper to say that environmental destruction is a slow, creeping invasion, and what we are defending is not just our livelihood, but our sanity.
The most interesting aspect of this discussion, for me, is the recognition of certain kinds of environmental aesthetic stimuli as essential to mental health. We know that the brain is a sensing, processing machine, requiring constant stimuli to make sense of the world. Remove all stimuli, and people quickly go insane; without new data points, the brain stops making sense of itself. Too much stimuli and we become overloaded — equally unhealthy. But beyond variations in quantity, there are also variations in kind to pay attention to. Are there certain qualities of light that better enable us to function? Are there proportions and perspectives that make us feel in balance and emotionally secure? (For example, having evolved in an environment where trees have a certain proportional relationship to the human body, say between 2x and 8x as tall, does living in an environment that is more vertically structured, up to 220x in height maybe, create a sense of insecurity? I wonder this as a devoted city-dweller — I love skyscrapers, but is there another level on which they are making me anxious? Would I be smarter or calmer if I lived in the forest?)
One study, done by Peter Kahn, a developmental psychologist and member of the editorial board of a new journal called Ecopsychology, suggests that natural stimuli effect our physiology in basic ways. Kahn tested a group of adults subjected to mild stress while looking at one of three different views: a window looking out over a scene of grass and trees, a 50″ plasma screen of the same scene in real time, and a blank wall. Measuring the heart rates of the subjects showed that they decreased fastest in the group looking at the real nature scene, while those looking at the TV had the same results as those facing the wall. This suggests that not only does environment unconsciously effect our reactions, but also that we can’t fake it. An authentic aesthetic experience is necessary to feel the benefits of the interaction with the natural environment.
What does this have to do with joy? Many of the stimuli we consider to be aesthetics of joy are natural and environmental. Sunlight, lushness, open and expansive spaces. The emotion joy evolved at a time in human history where there was no dichotomy between artificial and natural — before industrialization, before agriculture, when our connection to the environment meant survival. The ideas of ecopsychology — solastalgia and the idea of an ecomental system — resonate so strongly with me because of this history. Joy isn’t a result of what goes on in the mind alone; joy is an ecomental interaction, a constant dialogue between the brain, the senses, and the things we encounter in the world. It’s often said that happiness comes from within, but joy comes from without — from the impressions made by pleasurable things on our retinas, our fingertips, and our tongues, the way they disrupt the flow our thoughts and focus them on beauty and wonder. For me, this piece was an important reminder that those wonderful, natural things may be instrumental not just in joy, but in the whole of mental health — and therefore an important reminder that so much depends on our willingness to defend them.
I’m loving these new offerings from the brilliant duo behind quirky housewares company Alice Supply Co. The new nautical color scheme gives the plungers a kind of Dr. Seussian vibe — like the long tail of the Cat in the Hat. The ping-pong paddles are particularly inspired to me. While they don’t fall under the core mandate of housewares, they’re a natural opportunity to add joy to the mundane through color and pattern. Somehow, dressed in stripes, these paddles seem like they should always have looked that way.
Personally, though, the items I’m most coveting are the hammers. If I had a hammer like these, everything would be a nail!
There’s something so delightful to me about this midcentury child’s table and stools set with its colorful wedge-patterned laminate surfaces. I think the splayed tripod legs look kind of anthropomorphic, like an unsteady toddler, which adds a sense of a cuteness to the appeal.
Or live vicariously and feel the delight emanating off the screen from the bubble wrap scene in Wall-E. What does it say about our culture that we we envision such an oddly iconic pleasure as a connection point between two futuristic robots? What timeless part of our psyche does bubble wrap speak to?
These variegated poufs of carnations are like a gorgeous brand of cheerleaders’ pom-poms. I love how this arrangement makes a prosaic blossom seem so luxurious. They’re so tactile too — you can just imagine how the cool, feathery petals would feel on your hands.
It’s not really lemonade season at the moment, but Seth Godin has a nice little parable on his blog about business and joy as told through the classic child’s first business. One is a garden variety lemonade stand, with the usual reconstituted beverage served for just a dollar in a Dixie cup. The other is run by a little girl making lemonade from scratch for the love of it, offering it for free but leaving a jar for tips. As he describes this second stand,
The whole time that’s she’s squeezing, she’s also talking to you, sharing her insights (and yes, her joy) about the power of lemonade to change your day. It’s a beautiful day and she’s in no real hurry. Lemonade doesn’t hurry, she says. It gets made the right way or not at all. Then she urges you to take a bit less sugar, because it tastes better that way.
….
Finally, once she’s done, you put $5 in the jar, because your free lemonade was worth at least twice that. Well, maybe the lemonade itself was worth $3, but you’d happily pay again for the transaction. It touched you. In fact, it changed you.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the transformative power of joy — the way a single moment of delight can shift the course of your mood and your day. A joyful moment can have ripple effects, in the way you treat other people, the things you notice in your environment, the paths you choose to take, the interactions you have with objects and people. Joy can transform space — making it feel more open or more intimate — and it can transform time, shrinking so that your delight spills over its boundaries.
The idea that lemonade could change you sounds silly at first. But in this case lemonade is a conduit for the sharing of joy. It is a craftsperson’s joy distilled into an aesthetic experience for a consumer — to experience, and to pass on.
A small note of shameless self-promotion: my Animo kid’s chair is being exhibited at imm Cologne, which runs today through the 24th. The exhibit is part of a collaboration between Pratt and Germany’s Folkwang academy called “Take a Seat.” You can see some of my co-exhibitors here. I’m very excited to have my work showing at this amazing international venue and with such talented designers!
The chair was inspired by watching the way children move: joyfully, experimentally, and totally unselfconsciously. Intended for experimental learning environments such as museums, it supports these healthy movements through a unique system of energy absorption. Based on the tensile balance of a highly elastic material (bungee cords) and an inelastic one (nylon panels), it translates a child’s energy into a dynamic visual display. More info about the chair, including models that show how the mechanism was developed, is here.
Also, I just want to give a public “thank you!” to the amazing John Medley, who fixed the prototype after the tension from the bungee cords bent it out of shape — John definitely saved the day.
On Sunday night I finally saw Avatar. I think I was one of the last people in New York City to do so. I saw it on the Imax at Lincoln Square. I can’t imagine what it would be like on a regular screen or without the 3D, but I’m sure it pales in comparison — just the sheer scale and immersiveness of the experience were dazzling.
There’s so much to say about the joy of this experience, (and also where it fell short), but the most compelling aspect for me is the world James Cameron has created in Pandora. I’m sure I’m not the only one who felt a little bummed to be back in the real world after the film was over, and found the transition from sacred trees to streets a little jarring. It’s a transition from a joyful world to a mundane one, from a place filled with magic and wonder to a city that feels dull and sublunary by comparison. And the difference is all in the aesthetics.
Cameron takes a seemingly ordinary rainforest (already a lush, joyful environment) and imbues it with light, movement, and magic. Everything native to Pandora glows: the trees, the seeds, the mosses, the waters — even the animals. The peculiar luminosity is celestial; the lichens become like a carpet of stars, the tree of life like a cluster of comets. (It kills me, by the way, that I can’t get still images to illustrate these things — evidently the Avatar PR machine is more interested in gunships and battles than the beauty of the setting. Did I miss something? Or wasn’t that just the whole point of the movie?)
Anyway, bioluminescence has long been a source of wonder here on Earth, whether in fireflies or glowworm caves or tropical bays of phosphorescent plankton. But in our world, it’s a rare pleasure, one that many people never experience firsthand. Cameron has taken this joy and scaled it up, creating a world ablaze with ethereal light. Pandora’s light is magical because of its inexplicable beauty — like the earthly bioluminescence it emulates, it operates through chemical light-making processes that seem mystical in contrast to the logical workings of electricity — like a hidden flow of energy.
“A hidden flow of energy” is Cameron’s actual explanation for the bioluminescence in the film. The scientists in the film state that the organisms function like a neural network, all connected to each other symbiotically. This connectedness is another joyful theme, since joy is very much about unity, coming together, and inclusiveness. The aesthetic illustration of this is the bond formed when the Na’vi encounter certain other organisms — the animals they ride to hunt, their mates, or the tree of life. The fusion of the illuminated tendrils calls to mind a kind of neural embrace, where disparate elements craving contact find each other and communicate wordlessly.
These energy flows are magical, and they manifest in other ways besides communication and light. The mountains of Pandora float in midair, like karst formations reflected in still water, and are described to be constantly moving. Creatures float as well. The seeds of the tree of life drift like glowing white-violet jellyfish, giving the impression that Pandora’s atmosphere is rich with this energy, changing its density at will from the thinness of air to the thickness of water. And of course, in the end, (spoiler alert) it’s a mysterious energy flow from the tree of life that saves our hero and Pandora itself.
It’s not just the behavior of organisms, but also their forms that display joyful aesthetics. Cameron uses the lushness of the rainforest, amplified in scale and density, to create a sense of vitality and renewal. He uses lots of spiral and circular forms, such as the small creature that spins on its fan-like wing (a living whirlygig), or the giant spiral-shaped plant that retreats into itself when exposed to touch (no doubt inspired in behavior by the real-world touch-sensitive mimosa). Swooping curves rule in Pandora, whether it’s chalice-like flowers, dangling curls of vines, or the delicate tendrils of the Eywa seeds. Cameron’s artists also play with scale, making some things giant, like the beautiful broad leaves the break the Na’vi’s fall as the leap from the sky, and other things tiny, like the seeds or the spinning creature. All of these are recurring aesthetic motifs in joyful things, both natural and manmade.
Ultimately, it’s these aesthetics of joy that make the Na’vi’s world so mesmerizing, and make us feel that this place is valuable and desperately worth saving. The aesthetics of magic and renewal give an impression that there is salvation for us in this place, not in the (clumsily-named) mineral unobtainium, but in the mystical goodness that underpins such manifest joy. For me, these aesthetics of delight in Pandora’s design do far more than the clunky dialogue and heavy-handed plot to suggest the moral. All of these wonders were inspired by things in our own world. Cameron has said he was inspired to create a bioluminscent Pandora by his experiences night-diving. The rainforest, though perhaps not as fantastical, is still a lush world rich with undiscovered species. Many of the animals on Pandora are hybrids of familiar organisms, like fearsome land-mammal with the rhino body and the hammerhead shark face, which call out these remarkable features — no less remarkable for the fact they occur separately in our world. And science lately is filled with new discoveries about the ways that flora and fauna communicate with each other chemically, much like Pandora’s hidden energy flow.
The more I think about Pandora, the more I think about the beauty of the world that inspired it, which is really the point here. Yes, the technology is a great leap forward, and yes, the 3D experience is revolutionary. But in 5 years this will be common, in 15 it will be primitive. I think the artistic achievement is much greater than the technical one, and more lasting, in the way it abstracts our world away from us, and filters it through a joyful lens, allowing us to discover its rare pleasures anew. Though at first it seems our world is at a disconnect from the magic of Pandora, actually, our world is filled with Pandoran moments, (or Pandora is just an amplification of earthly moments). What is joyful in Pandora is what makes it worth saving, and a good illustration of what makes our own world worth saving too.
Fine print
Aesthetics of Joy practices free love — no money is accepted for any recommendation on this site. All original work here is under copyright, so please get in touch if you'd like to republish.
Also, please note that the ramblings on this blog are my own opinions and do not in any way signify the views of my employer or any organization with which I am affiliated.
There’s something so delightful to me about this midcentury child’s table and stools set with its colorful wedge-patterned laminate surfaces. I think the splayed tripod legs look kind of anthropomorphic, like an unsteady toddler, which adds a sense of a cuteness to the appeal.
