aesthetics of joy

It’s been a hot summer (today was no exception) and since the first taste of this ebbing-and-flowing heat wave, I’ve been thinking about swimming pools. There is no greater luxury or greater joy in a midsummer city than a swimming pool, a cool watery oasis in a desert of hot reeking concrete. Last summer there was the frenzy of the Gowanus dumpster pools, now converted into a public attraction by the Bloomberg administration for Summer Streets. Before that, the most talked-about New York pool was the floating pool lady, a barge converted to a pool by the city that debuted in 2007 in Brooklyn, and that docks in a different borough each summer. I haven’t managed to swim in either, but this summer I’ve been the benefactor of the generosity of a friend with a private pool, a backyard gem in the East Village that is all the more tantalizing for its secrecy.

After a couple of years living in Sydney, it’s hard to be without a pool. There, private pools are rare, but the public ones are ubiquitous and stunning. There’s the Andrew Boy Charleton pool, a 50m beauty that makes you feel like you’re literally swimming in the harbor. There’s also the North Sydney pool, right in the shadow of the Harbor Bridge. And there are the ocean pools, so beloved by Australians that they have their own culture, a culture robust enough to be the subject of a documentary: Sea Pool: A Life in the Ocean, teased in the video above. Bondi Icebergs, shown in the teaser, is particularly amazing; fed by crashing waves, it is briny and bracing all year round. Membership requires that you swim every weekend, regardless of the weather. Do that for five years, and you’re a member for life. It is the ultimate pool-lover’s pool club.

A frigid pool on a hot day is a delight; on a cold day, it is a trial. This may be an illustration of the difference between joy and happiness. Joy is immediate, momentary. It reacts to stimuli that accompanied the satisfaction of needs over the many generations of our evolution. A hot body in a cold pool is one step closer to homeostasis, and the aesthetics of the swimming pool (cool, shimmering blueness) are all designed to advertise that temperature-regulating function. Hot and cold in tension, moving towards balance: there is a certain kind of harmony there. A cold body in a cold pool, on the other hand, stands in defiance of emotional logic. The winter swimmer must see something beyond the immediate, because the proximate experience is discomfort, possibly even pain. Past the trial must be something: the satisfaction of completing a goal, the strength of physicality inured, the delight of an invitation to a company of like minds. It’s the pre-frontal cortex that envisions and plans this, that looks past disharmony towards a greater future pleasure. Joy, arising unconsciously from the limbic brain, revels in a more immediate gratification.

Along with the harmony of the pool, there is also freedom. Buoyant, liberated from gravity, we float in effortless space. We glide on the edge of another world, one in which the usual rules of movement are relaxed and transformed. I’m reminded of a moment in the John Cheever story The Swimmer:

To be embraced and sustained by the light green water was less a pleasure, it seemed, than the resumption of a natural condition, and he would have liked to swim without trunks, but this was not possible, considering his project.*

The waterborne lightness of swimming does feel natural, even in the truly unnatural setting of the swimming pool. And it feels freeing, even though the pool is a fixed, bounded area. The pool becomes an oasis, a space where the rules, both natural and cultural, are different. Not only are we free to move differently, but we are free to act differently: We do spontaneous headstands, splash around in silly patterns, lounge indolently. We are a bit more childlike, and perhaps more like our real selves. Childlike pleasure is often a breadcrumb on the route to joy, and the child’s love of the swimming pool is a clue to a delight buried within most of us.

Do we grow out of the joy of the pool? Ellen Meloy writes in her ode to the pool, a chapter called “Swimming the Mojave” from her memoir, The Anthropology of Turquoise:

The human body needs the embrace of water. The fifties boom in California swimming pools, and the attachment of pools to the culture of a mobilized America, announced affluence, comfort, and good climate, and it made the embrace available in controlled circumstances: big recreational bathtubs gone outdoors, with no worry about what might lurk in their depths. For everyone but children, for whom it is a baptism of sheer joy, a pool holds more chlorine than wonder.

It’s true that a pool can be fake, and chemical, and wasteful. In a backyard, it can be mundane. In a desert, absurd. But I still think there’s always a glimmer of joy in the swimming pool, regardless of your age. It’s in the faces and movements of those in the video above—a visceral pleasure, a reawakening of body, a liberation of spirit. A pool may be an artificial experience, but the joy is all real.

*The Swimmer tells the story of a man who decides to swim home from a party, dipping into all the pools along the way.

Sea Pool: A Life in the Ocean, by Jason Wingrove
More teasers here and here

{Thanks, Sarah, for the link to the video above, and the swims!}

This was a nice find in an email from a reader this week: a visual poem called “How To Be Alone” by filmmaker Andrea Dorfman and writer Tanya Davis. The joy of being alone is an interesting contrast to all the recent research about how important social connection is to joy and to long-term happiness (some of which I alluded to in my most recent Core77 column). At first it seems that hanging out alone is antithetical to joy, especially given social stigma against it. But I like the poem’s observation that often when you’re alone is actually when you meet the most interesting people. That’s certainly been my experience when traveling — it’s easiest to be alone as a stranger in a strange land, and people often surprise me with their friendliness. I still have friends today that I met on solo adventures in various parts of the world.

Being alone is also an optimal time for finding “flow,” Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s name for being absorbed in creative pursuits. There is also social flow, for sure, but the individual kind has a certain kind of satisfaction to it because it’s all yours.

Solitude is often painted as deprivation, but it can just as easily be self-indulgent. I don’t think I’m one of those people who will ever strap on dancing shoes and go to club on my own (maybe because I just don’t go to clubs that much even with others), but I do savor a little bit of time out every week (this blog being a big product of that). I’ve always been that way too — as an only child growing up in the suburbs, I spent a lot of time watching the world go by from the branches of an old beech tree. It’s nice to see this simple pleasure encouraged, not in the typical authoritative self-help tone, but in a matter-of-fact, yet whimsical way. I like the idea in the poem that to be alone for those not used to it is brave, rather than something you should feel normal doing. We evolved to seek companionship. We find safety in numbers. Solitude can feel unnatural, but rewarding.

It’s not a typical aesthetic of joy. It may even be a counter-aesthetic of joy, in the traditional sense. But I think there’s a quiet delight to be found here.

{Thanks, Johnny.}

Well, I’m back after a longish, unscheduled break. Let’s call it a summer (working) holiday. But wow, did I miss it. I don’t plan on taking this much time away from the blog again for a long time. There are just too many interesting and joyful things to write about…

Before I launch into some thoughts on the things I’ve been reading and observing in the last few weeks, I want to just say a quick thank you to everyone who has commented, sent me an email, or sent me links recently. This summer has left me breathless, and I haven’t had a chance to respond to everyone yet, but rest assured that I will, and that I appreciate the kind words, the thoughtful recommendations, and the healthy debate you bring to my inbox. Thanks!

On my mind today are the aesthetics of nature. A big part of my thesis for Aesthetics of Joy is that joy evolved to guide us unconsciously towards things that would have been beneficial for our survival (or more accurately, the survival of our genetic material). It stands to reason that since during the bulk of this evolution humans were nomadic creatures living in an environment with far more trees than skyscrapers, natural environments are going to be replete with stimuli that make us feel joyful. Bright sunlight, ripe fruits, wide open spaces—these primal joys hold clues that give context and meaning to many of the things that delight us in the modern world. And as the research supporting evolutionary theories of psychology continues to accumulate, the evidence suggesting the connection between aesthetics of nature and our wellbeing is beginning to mount.

On his Frontal Cortex blog, now on Wired.com, Jonah Lehrer has a great discussion of some findings from the emerging field of ecopsychology, which looks at the relationship between nature and the mind. (I first wrote about this field of research in February, here.) One study, dating back to the mid-1990s, looked at female housing project residents, some of whom were living in apartments facing city streets and basketball courts, and others who had views of a grassy, landscaped courtyard. The women were tested on everything from attention to their ability to cope with life’s challenges, and those with the more natural view tested better on nearly every measure. Similarly, in a 2008 study led by Marc Berman at the University of Michigan, students who were given time to walk through a park before taking a series of tests performed better on measures of attention and memory than those who had walked through city streets.

According to psychologists, views of nature are restorative. They seem to allow the brain to reset and concentrate again. This reminds me of an insight noted by Chip and Dan Heath in their book Switch: Willpower, they observe, is finite. When you expend a lot of effort trying to control cravings, desires, or emotions in a certain situation, it can be draining, leaving you with little energy to control yourself in others. I wonder if there’s a similar mechanism going on here. Functioning in urban environments takes a lot of mental energy. It requires high alertness, and it’s sensorially complex; there’s a lot to process. I wonder if views of nature provide a reset because they are simply easier on our brains, evolved as they are for processing the stimuli in this environment.

This may be, but it’s not the whole story. Another study, also cited in the article on solastalgia I quoted in my February post, adds another piece to the puzzle. The study, conducted by Peter Kahn, took participants and stressed them out with a series of math tests, and then gave them one of three views to look at: a window facing out onto a tree-filled view, a plasma screen of the same view, and a blank wall. Those looking at the natural scene had the quickest stress reduction (measured by a decrease in heart rate). Those looking at the blank wall had a much slower return to normal heart rate. We could’ve predicted that. Subjects who looked at the nature scene and the plasma screen both looked at their views longer than those looking at the blank wall. Also a no-brainer. But surprisingly, the subjects who looked at the plasma screen showed virtually the same stress-reduction pattern as those looking at the wall. So while we’re drawn towards a views of nature to relieve our stress, it has to be real nature. It’s not something we can trace to one aesthetic element—like the color green or the contours of the leaves—and bottle it. It’s the full multisensory, immersive aesthetics of nature, all together, that foster wellbeing and joy.

Apparently, the kind of nature matters too. Lehrer’s post mentions another study that demonstrated that people who spend time in parks with a greater diversity of plant life score better on tests of psychological wellbeing than those who spend time in less biodiverse parks. A patch of grass may be green, but it’s not nature. A diverse park is more like nature, naturally, and probably a lot more like the environments in which our brains grew up. Variety, as much as greenness or leafiness, is an aesthetic of nature, and it seems it does us a lot of good.

Another fascinating insight about our brain and nature comes from an interview with Mark Changizi, an evolutionary neurobiologist whose latest book explores new research on human vision, on the Neuronarrative blog. Changizi observes that one of the reasons its so easy for humans to read (those of us who are literate read thousands of words in a day) is that our letterforms mimic natural shapes. He suggests that if our words looked like barcodes or fractal patterns, we would not be able to process them nearly as quickly. He says:

To be easy on the eye, writing needs to “look like nature,” just what our illiterate visual systems are fantastically competent at processing. The trick of that research direction was making this “writing looks like nature” idea rigorous, and coming up with ways of testing it. I show that there are certain signature visual patterns found in nearly any natural environment with opaque objects strewn about, and that these signature patterns are found in human writing. In short, writing has evolved so that written words look like visual objects.

I have to pause to marvel at the beauty of this insight, which is nothing short of thrilling for readers, writers, and typographers all. But as the awe subsides, I wonder if this fascinating insight holds a clue to applying aesthetics of nature to design in ways that really do foster our wellbeing. I’m sick of seeing wallpaper that looks like birch trees or tables with grass growing in the middle put forth as design’s  solution to the urban condition. Can’t we do better? As the plasma screen experiment demonstrated, a picture of nature isn’t going to cut it, and while it’s certainly a fine idea to have some plants around, I think we could go about “bringing the outside in” in a more sophisticated way. Perhaps there are visual patterns or spatial arrangements that better mimic a natural environment, design ideas that can be applied to urban planning, architecture, interiors, and products to provide some of the same benefits. It’s encouraging to think that we may be on the cusp of learnings that will help us bring more aesthetics of nature into our citified lives.

Of course, there’s another implication here, not for the design of a home necessarily, but maybe for the design of a lifestyle. Get outdoors. Do it often and especially when you’re stressed. Because no matter how well we’re eventually able to design to mimic nature, there’s no substitute for the real thing.

I’ve been wanting to do a post on illusions for a while now. There’s something interesting to me in the way illusions create a sense of wonder, revealing magic in seemingly ordinary images and forms. Illusions can also be somewhat unsettling, forcing us to accept that our usual standard for proof — “I’ll believe it when I see it” — is not always so reliable. This tension, between wonder at the impossible and subsequent distrust of our faculties makes illusions a fascinating area of exploration for aesthetics of joy. What determines whether an illusion brings joy or anxiety? And why are we so transfixed by illusions in the first place?

I started thinking about a piece on illusions after receiving an email about a new public installation (above) by the artist Felice Varini in New Haven, presented by Site Projects. The name was familiar, but I didn’t know his work; after a bit of exploration, I discovered that Varini specializes in the creation of a particular variety of trompe l’oeil illusion. The artist paints a large-scale graphic shape on three-dimensional surfaces so that when viewed from one particular spot, there is an illusion of a two-dimensional graphic superimposed on the scene. It’s hard to explain, but easy to understand if you look at these images or watch this video.

Trompe l’oeil (meaning “trick the eye”) illusions  like this can be particularly satisfying because they involve the demonstration of artistic skill. Usually this skill is used to create depth where none exists; Varini flips the convention on its head and creates an illusion of impossible flatness. To watch how he does this is extraordinary (see this video) because it is just so simple. Using projected light, he is able to identify and fill in the essential surfaces for his enormous illusions.

As often happens when you get an idea in your head, you start seeing instances of it everywhere, and suddenly I found myself surrounded by illusions. I attended a wedding in Santa Fe and found this installation on a wall in that city’s history museum. (The second photo shows how it works.)

Then Scientific American Mind magazine released a special issue on illusions, featuring over a hundred different examples, noting, “Illusions push the mysterious and wondrous brain into revealing its secrets.” And shortly thereafter I ended up at a SciCafe event at the Natural History museum here in New York only to hear astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson weigh in on the subject. As he waxed philosophical about the limits of human intelligence, he inquired, “Why do we call them optical illusions? We should call them brain failures!”

There’s an interesting tension in those last two views, both perspectives from science. Are the effects of illusions a demonstration of the brain’s wondrous workings, or are they evidence of its foibles and failings? Perhaps both. As neuroscience researchers Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. Macknik observe in SciAm Mind, “Although our sensations feel accurate and truthful, they do not necessarily reproduce the physical reality of the outside world.” We trust the inputs from our senses when faced with conflicting information about something in the world. If we see an elephant but someone tells us we’re looking at a giraffe, we trust our eyes more than our companion. But when information from our senses conflicts with understood laws of nature, such as in this illusion (below) where a printed graphic appears to be moving, we become aware of the limits of our brain and our senses. Illusions are like test cases at these outer limits of perception. They reveal the boundaries of our brain’s ability to interpret the world in our minds, but in doing so, they also reveal just how successful the brain is at that task of interpretation most of the time.

Am I off-topic here? What does any of this have to do with joy?

I think there is a strong connection between magic and joy: when the world presents us with an experience that is somehow impossible, implausible, or inexplicable by intuitive logic. Magic implies a contradiction inherent in the world. It brings joy when it’s non-threatening (otherwise it breeds anxiety) and when its secret is obscure enough that it can be re-experienced again and again. Optical illusions perform this kind of magic. Even when you know what kind of trick the illusion is playing with your brain, you cannot prevent yourself from experiencing it, which leads to a particular kind of rediscoverable wonder. Illusions are particularly fruitful for design because of this rediscoverability. They are more than visual jokes; they are satisfying even when you know the punchline.

The reality is that the magic of illusion is not evidence of a contradiction in the world. It’s a contradiction somewhere between the world and our own minds. They are lost-in-translation moments, “brain failures” in Dr. Tyson’s parlance. But our ability to find ways to play with these quirks at the margins of our perception has made them delightful failures — an accidental, yet beautiful sort of aesthetics of joy.

Felice Varini images courtesy of Site Projects. Installation will be up until June 2011.

For those who may not have seen via twitter, I’m very excited to announce a new collaboration with Core77 — I’ll be writing a monthly column on the site, starting right now! My first piece is actually more about design and psychology more broadly, but it relates to the unconscious effects of aesthetics that I often write about here on the site. Here’s an excerpt:

If you want to convince someone about something, you’d better give them a soft seat.

This is one design implication coming out of a surprising new set of studies that examines the relationship between our sense of touch and our attitudes and decisions. The studies looked at the unconscious associations between aesthetic elements such as texture, hardness, and weight, and found that by exposing subjects to these elements, researchers could elicit different responses to the same social questions and tests.

For example, study participants who sat in a soft seat and were asked to negotiate with a car dealer made far more generous second offers than those who sat in hard seats. The hard seats literally made them more rigid. Similarly, when volunteers were asked to read and evaluate a story about an interaction between a supervisor and an employee, the ones in the hard wooden chairs viewed the boss as stricter and more rigid than the ones who sat in soft, cushioned chairs. In another experiment, participants who had just put together a puzzle with pieces coated in rough sandpaper were more likely to find a story of an ambiguous social interaction to be difficult and adversarial than those who had put together a puzzle made of smooth, varnished pieces. Harsh textures evidently prime us to think harshly. Other related studies have shown correlations between temperature and social attitudes (proving the intrinsic truth behind the phrases “warm fuzzies” and “cold pricklies”), between weight and perceived seriousness, and between “clean smells” and moral behavior.

Click here to head over to Core77 to keep reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts, and know about other topics you might like to see covered in this new forum. Thanks for reading!

A few months ago I wrote about the architecture of worship — about how elements like elevation, light, and scale create a sense of awe that supports transcendent, spiritual joy. These elements are common to holy places: churches, temples, and mosques, as well as many spiritually significant natural spaces.

This morning, as I was reading The Architecture of Happiness (this is inspiring a lot of thinking at the moment), I came across a discussion of another aesthetic element that might stimulate that wonderful perspective shift we associate with religious joy: pattern at scale. Alain de Botton writes:

Muslim artisans covered the walls of houses and mosques with repeating sequences of delicate and complicated geometries, through which the infinite wisdom of God might be intimated. This ornamentation, so pleasingly intricate on a rug or a cup, was nothing less than hallucinatory when applied to an entire hall. Eyes accustomed to seeing only the practical and humdrum objects of daily life could, inside such a room, survey a world shorn of all associations with the everyday. They would sense a symmetry, without quite being able to grasp its underlying logic. Such works were like the products of a mind with none of our human limitations, of a higher power untainted by human coarseness and therefore worthy of unconditional reverence.

In prior posts, I’ve talked about pattern’s ability to create a sense of abundance, through a visual illusion that uses surface to mimic volume and quantity. This matters because we are innately drawn to abundance, and the aesthetic abundance of patterns such as dots and stripes seems to satisfy a vestigial hunger in our primal mind. Trained to the cycles of glut and privation, we crave quantity as a bulwark against an uncertain future.

But what about the type of pattern that de Botton is talking about — pattern so vast and so staggering, it creates an abundance almost incomprehensible to the human mind? At these orders of magnitude, dazzled by a supernatural abundance, our minds struggle to reconcile the scale of what we’re witnessing with the boundaries of our experience. We measure this new experience against the possible, the normal, and the likely; in each case, our existing mental models are challenged and stretched, causing us to wonder about how this experience came to be. We also face this conflict, between a new experience and our mental models, at encounters with great scale (Grand Canyon), great force (a thunderstorm), great talent (a passionate aria), or great good fortune (“miracles”). For the spiritually inclined, religious belief becomes a way to accommodate an amazing new experience, to explain it and the feeling it triggers within us. For non-believers, though the explanation may be different, the aesthetic awe and resulting joy is there too. It is joy at its mysterious best.

There is also, as de Botton observes, a transporting effect played by pattern at scale. The patterns that line the insides of mosques, like the colored light from stained glass windows, create a world apart. They are immersive and enveloping, jolting the mind away from mundane concerns and holding them at attention. In this way, they function not just as context for worship but a tool of it. Like a zen Buddhist koan, the endlessness of pattern dazzles and contains our restless minds, leaving them primed and open for transcendence.

Yesterday while riding the Q train into Manhattan, my friend Maggie and I made a joyful discovery! She noticed it first — flashes of graffiti that looked cute, almost childlike. Then as we watched, the recurring images resolved themselves into an animation, a kind of underground zoetrope.

I was too slow with the video camera to catch it, but courtesy of YouTube, you can see it above. A little googling revealed that the work is called Masstransiscope, and was installed on a disused subway platform by independent filmmaker Bill Brand in 1980. Evidently it fell into disrepair, but was restored in 2008.

The piece is pure joy. It has no other purpose than to be a surprising bright spot in a morning commute, an interjection of whimsy into the dark underground. Does that make it frivolous? It reminds me of a post I wrote last summer about public art, which speculated on the purpose and value of art commissioned for communal spaces. The post was a response to an article that disparaged recent works in this field as amusing but “relatively empty experiences,” and in it I argued that joy is a very valid, and indeed, an important purpose for public art.

Recently, I read something that bolstered my conviction on this point. In Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton references a theory advanced at the turn of the 20th century by German art historian Wilhelm Worringer. One component of his theory explains our collective taste in art as a kind of craving for what we lack as a society. In de Botton’s words, a society “would love in art whatever it did not possess in sufficient supply within itself. Public art, then, serves a critical rebalancing function, especially in cities. Color, light, and playful forms restore harmony to a dense gray city. Lighthearted art creates moments that break the stress of urban living. Soft sculptures create ease in a hard, concrete landscape. They are emotional oases, and in my view, they are essential to a vibrant, healthy city life.

I think there’s food for further thought here. Some things have no justification on rational grounds. They could seem pointless or even wasteful, but our increasing awareness of the importance of emotion may illuminate their value. What else seems frivolous or unnecessary, but might actually be vital because of its emotional function?

Feeling arty today, inspired by a semi-monthly art outing tradition I have with a couple of friends this afternoon. Most of the time this blog focuses on explaining joy, but today I just feel like sharing some. These paintings are by Berlin-based Barcelona artist Yago Hortal.

Ok, I changed my mind. I was going to just post some art, but as the title of this post suggests, I can’t help but noodle this a little more. Why do colorful swirls of paint make us feel so stimulated and uplifted? Why does art move us so? This question is especially significant in abstraction, where there’s no subject matter to react to, no inherent narrative, just pure sensation dancing about on our rods and cones. I’ve offered up a bunch of ideas on this blog about color, curves, and so on — why specific aesthetic elements may have evolved to make us feel joy. Recently I’ve come across a theory that puts our desire to make and view art in a more macro evolutionary context. In his book The Art Instinct, philosopher Denis Dutton contends that art arose as a (rather sophisticated) way of attracting a mate. He connects art with evolution through sexual selection, the aspect of evolutionary theory that deeply troubled Darwin before he was able to explain it, because it fostered the success of traits at cross-purposes with survival. (The peacock’s tail is the classic example here: Large and brightly colored tails may make a peacock more vulnerable to predators, but they’re selected for anyway because peahens prefer them. Research suggests this is because they indicate a peacock carries a lower parasite load than his dull-plumed buddies.)

Making art may once have said, “I’d make a good mate because I’m clever and creative,” selecting the desire to make and appreciate art, music, literature, and performance into the human genetic makeup. Of course, that doesn’t mean that the link between art and sex is persistent, that our current appreciation of art is akin to artist-lust, that a gift of a painting is foreplay. Evolutionary theory doesn’t offer explanations for our reasoned behavior in the present; it merely gives us origin stories, roots that help explain the common ancestry of our universal predilections. Rather, for me, it’s interesting to know that when we view art, somewhere deep in our brain may be the trace of a neural connection that links such apparently purposeless beauty with the desire that fuels our renewal. That our joy in art is not detached contemplation, but visceral, emotional, and vital.

Yago Hortal via but does it float

Can something say “Keep Out!” and still be joyful?

This was the question that popped into my head as I considered the Razzle Dazzle Sculptural Security object, the angular plywood contraption jammed in the window of the house pictured above, by Detroit-based Design 99. The purpose of the Razzle Dazzle (more examples of which you can see below) is to protect empty houses from squatting and vandalization, a common problem in Detroit neighborhoods. An alternative to boarding up doors and windows, the method signifies that someone is interested in looking after a place.

A strong thread of joyful activism runs through all of Design 99’s projects: the brightly-painted Power House, a community space cum sculpture made from a previously empty house, or the Neighborhood Machine, a similarly hued Bobcat with trailers that can be appended for various urban renewal tasks, such as gardening and collecting found material. For these projects, aesthetics of joy such as bright color, stripes, and other patterns catch the eye and raise awareness for urban renewal projects. They also telegraph the spirit of the movement, and offer an exuberant energy that might inspire volunteers and invite onlookers to join in. The aesthetics visually convey the intent of the artists behind Design 99, Gina Reichert and Mitch Cope:

The Power House intends to be a stimulator and not an end in itself as a singular art object. The Power House is a broadcaster of potential ideas and a place to plug those ideas into. The Power House will be used as an interactive site, by us and by our neighbors. The Power House will become a symbol for creativity, new beginnings and social interaction within the neighborhood.

But while the house and the machine seek to invite, the purpose of the Razzle Dazzle is entirely different. It’s a three-dimensional “No Trespassing” sign. So there’s an inherent tension between the spiky, angular form, which articulates (and enforces) the “stay away” message, and the vibrant pattern, which is a visceral enticement. There is also a tension in the way the piece is crafted. The Razzle Dazzle’s form is haphazard, seemingly cobbled together from debris — something you might expect to see at an abandoned site. It looks like it might itself be an act of vandalism. But the deliberate color treatment transforms the meaning of the piece. It says, “Someone put me here on purpose,” and therefore, “Someone cares about this place.”

In this way, the Razzle Dazzle is inviting. Through a splash of color, it offers the promise that a space will be inhabited by people who will care for it and restore it. It’s an invitation to return, suggesting that next time you visit, it may not be an abandoned shack, but a lively business, a vibrant community gathering space, or a home. It’s a joyful “Keep Out,” because it’s also a “Come Back Soon.”

{via Core77}

Power House and Neighborhood Machine

Neighborhood Machine with solar panel trailer attached

Gardening trailer for Neighborhood Machine

Razzle Dazzle Sculptural Security objects

I posted Leah Rosenberg’s delightful work earlier this month, and couldn’t resist a follow-up post of this amazing rainbow cake she made for her show. The cake was 7′ feet long and made in 13 7″ sections, each with a different configuration of stripes. This really adds another joyful dimension — variation and surprise — as she writes:

So over time throughout the night, as it was cut & consumed (from both sides towards the center of the cake) the colors and stripe pattern of the slice of cake that you had would be different from the hours prior.

She must have been baking forever, but how beautiful! I also love how pure and serene the long white cake looks before it was cut. You’d never guess the riot of color that lay inside.

Check out more photos from the show here.

I’m a little behind on things here, but please forgive me as it was due to a joyous occasion: my cousin’s gorgeous wedding in the wonderful town of Santa Fe. Unplugging for the weekend’s festivities, I nearly missed this review in Sunday’s NYT of a beautiful photography show ending today at the Laurence Miller Gallery. The show features nearly 50 images by the photographer Philippe Halsman, who distinguished himself by asking his (very famous) subjects to jump. Times critic Roberta Smith writes:

There is a sublime silliness to Halsman’s images that can make you laugh or at least smile regardless of how often you see them. They may offer incontrovertible proof of Schiller’s claim that “all art is dedicated to joy.” Evidently the simple act of getting off the ground requires giving in to something like joy. You have to let go.

Two big ideas here. The first is the notion that the images can make us smile over and over again. This is the essence of joy — its repeatability — which is it what makes this emotion so powerful, and so sustainable. This renewable quality tells us that we’re dealing with a joyful phenomenon, not a novelty or a one-liner or a joke,  that there’s something here that is likely to be universal and timeless.

The second big idea is joy’s inexorability — that there are some circumstances, actions, or gestures that bring joy out of us, voluntarily or not. When “you have to let go,” something has circumvented your conscious emotional control and tapped directly into your unconscious. And that too is a powerful thing.

Lately I’ve been reading the book Switch, by Chip and Dan Heath, about the psychology of behavior change. In the book, the authors reference a construct developed by psychologist Jonathan Haidt to explain the way our rational and emotional sides deal with each other. The emotional brain is like an elephant while the rational brain sits on top like its rider. The rider (our rational side) provides direction, while the elephant (emotion) provides the motivation and force that gets us to act. The rider looks like the boss, sitting up on top of the elephant, reins in hand. But the elephant is so massive that unless it goes along voluntarily, it’s hard for the rider to get his way.

I think this applies to our expressions, too. The rider provides a self-awareness and self-consciousness of our words, manners, facial expressions, and gestures that constantly reins in the elephant’s natural reactions, modulating to keep them in line with social convention. The rider trains the elephant, creating a filter that channels, and sometimes dampens our natural responses, as is culturally appropriate. But jumping jostles the rider off his perch, and it’s a tremendous relief for the elephant! (Even scowly Richard Nixon looks like he feels free in a Halsman photo.) In jumping, we are unburdened by self-consciousness, for any concern for how we look or what’s appropriate. We are all pure, elephantine joy.

Halsman himself said:

When you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed toward the act of jumping, and the mask falls, so that the real person appears.

I love this idea that the real person is the joyful person. What a powerful thing to think that despite all our anxieties and preoccupations there is always a true self inside, a joyful elephant, accessible in the most stupidly simple way imaginable.

It also fascinates me that it’s not just one joy portrayed here in Halsman’s images. The gesture is simple, but the range of feeling here is decidedly complex. There is the transcendent, floating joy of Eva Marie Saint, Audrey Hepburn’s childlike joy, Edward Steichen’s triumphant joy, Richard Nixon’s joy that feels barely liberated from repression, Dali’s giddy joy, and Marilyn Monroe’s pure, effortless euphoria. Together, these images represent a kind of catalog of human expressions of joy, a bodily language of delight.

There are other movements, too, that may have a similar effect. Certain gestures — jumping, certainly, but also spinning, gliding, sliding, hopping, skipping, floating, and swinging, among others — have a way of disrupting our self-conscious masks. These too are aesthetics of joy, sensations that play with our proprioceptive sense, deliciously pleasurable in the way they tweak our expectations of how our bodies should feel in relation to the world.

Happy holiday weekend, everyone. I hope there’s some joy in your next three days!

Images: Laurence Miller gallery
NYT: “The Joys of Jumpology”
Even more jumpology images…

In case you missed it, this Idea Lab visualization from Sunday’s NYT Magazine made me smile, and made me think.

It’s interesting to me the way aesthetics can transform the emotional tenor of content. Though the subject matter has a negative slant (partially genuine, partially comic), the circular shape, colors, and stripes emanating like rays of light from the center make the whole thing kind of delightful. But why? I think it’s because our emotions react to aesthetics before they process content. Even when the aesthetics and content are dissonant, the aesthetics guide our reactions, I guess because in most circumstances, aesthetics are an accurate shortcut to understanding content.

What are other good examples?

Really love this work by SF-based artist Leah Rosenberg. The pieces are made from sheets of acrylic paint layered over time. Stacked, they look like water-curled pages of old books, dyed in technicolor. The paint becomes form, rather than just surface. She writes:

My paintings are time and process-based works that combine elements of layering, systems of accrual, and color. I allow and encourage the build-up of paint to act in a three dimensional manner, at times to the point of doing away with the support altogether. These layers of paint function as a way to mark the passage of time, but also reveal the paints’ inherent materiality as it begins to take on its own shape. I select the colors based on personal systems, sometimes based on the text from a book that I am reading or lyrics of a song, other times reflecting a telephone call home to Saskatchewan, or the colors of the clothing worn by people who visit my studio throughout that day.

I love this idea of the shape of time accrued — the way each layer is a visualization of a moment, a chunk of time distilled into color and given shape by the ones that follow. Like a sedimentary rock in luminous, abundant color. And, not to overthink things too much, the pieces just look so wonderfully tactile.

Leah is having a show in SF at 18 Reasons, 593 Guerrero St., which opens Thursday, May 13. If you’re in the Bay Area, check it out (and send me some pictures, will you?).

I’m  still trying to put my finger on what exactly is so joyful about Bzzzpeek, a site where you can play recordings of what children think animals sound like in different parts of the globe. Is it the sweet, earnest quality of the children’s imitations? The general cuteness of the site design? Or just the charm of being able to travel the world via quacks and ribbits? I don’t know, but the moment it appeared in my inbox (thank you, Jon), it brought a smile to my face.

The deeper question here is why we feel the need to imitate animal sounds when we have words to describe the animals. Before we had language, “Moo,” was a good way to alert neighbors to a food source. Now, when we can say, “There’s a herd of cows grazing just over the grassy knoll,” “Moo” seems terribly obsolete. Of course, there are still a few functional reasons to make animal sounds: birders do it to attract different species to look at, pet owners do it out of some empathic desire to connect with their pets. But why do children do it? I wonder if there’s some innate pleasure in imitation, or if there’s some other reason why we simply enjoy making animal sounds. Thoughts?

Ice cream trucks from around the world! What is it about trucks that lend themselves so readily to decorating?

via Let’s Color

What a great visualization (click image to see larger) of color associations with emotions and other abstract ideas across different cultures from the people at Information is Beautiful. A nice complement to Emotionally Vague, a project I wrote about last year that looked at color associations across a narrower set of emotions.

It’s especially interesting to see what color associations are near universal: Passion, Purity, Truce, Cold, and Evil all have consistent meaning. Of course, my eye first went to joy, which appears to have consensus on yellow, until you realize only two cultures are represented. I’d bet that association would reasonably widespread, though.

One thing I’m wishing for here is a little more rigor on the sourcing. “Web sources” sounds dodgy; I’d love it if someone out there would do a proper survey, at least of the primary emotions, across a large number of cultures. My hypothesis would be that the more visceral and affective a concept is, the less culturally determined and more universal the color response would be. So physiological concepts like hot and cold, and emotional terms like passion, anger, sadness, and joy would be more consistent across cultures. More rational concepts like luck, luxury, and marriage, would be cultural determined and therefore prone to variation. Just a hypothesis, at this point.

via R. Walker (thanks!)

I’ve taken many plane rides before, but never seen a landscape quite like this. I recently stumbled upon this article showing Holland’s tulip fields from above. Can you believe there’s a landscape that actually looks like this? It’s like agricultural earth art. I had to dig up some more images for inspiration. Let’s hope all these April showers will bring us some, well, you know…

Images: livetowander, Daily Mail, powerfocusfotografie, Daily Mail, Samuel_Leo, _Darek, heavenuphere.

Spotted this on Oh Happy Day! I don’t drink soda but what a joyful idea for a party or event. And of course I’m a sucker for anything color-coded so this gave me a real thrill!

Several things have conspired to get me thinking about the joy of spinning these last few weeks. First there were Kate Spade’s joyful pinwheels, free for the taking and adorning the outsides of their New York shop windows. If any brand out there has embraced the aesthetics of joy and run with it, it has to be Kate Spade. Recent campaigns and store visuals have included cheery colors, hula hoops, polka dots, and artist Rebecca Ward’s colorful striped tape installations — whether by intent or intuition, they have a feel for visual elements of whimsy and delight.

The pinwheel idea seemed particularly clever to me because of its interactive component. Because they were offered up free to passers by, they tended to pop up in all kinds of places. I have one on my desk from the Soho store, which is a few blocks from my office. I have another at home (below), brought to my birthday party by a coworker (photo adorned by late night graffitoists).

In fact, Kate Spade had a contest encouraging people to send in pinwheel sightings, which were then tweeted, resulting in sweetly surprising images like this:

And this:

And then, in the subway recently, among a bag ladies prized possessions, I spied:

There’s a nice visual for me in the idea that the pinwheels are like seeds blown off a dandelion, scattered to the wind. And in fact, they do resemble the seeds with their long stems and wind-philic tops. The wind is of course the critical element in the pinwheel, a form of negative space (or force) that completes the design. A still pinwheel is an elegant thing, maybe even delightful, but it’s the almost-magical spinning movement that brings out the joy.

As I was pondering this, I received an email from a reader about a piece I’d missed in the NYT arts section, entitled, “Junkyard Poet of Whirligigs and Windmills.” A delicious headline if ever one existed, and the piece did not disappoint. The “junkyard poet” in question is Vollis Simpson, an accidental artist who at 91 is still making extraordinary sculptures from fan blades, propellers, and other scrap metal.

Originally a farm equipment repairman, Simpson began making things from scrap as a hobby, but has lived to see his work become highly regarded in the art world. This quote, in particular, struck me because it notes the universality of the emotion triggered by the spinning movement:

…he went to work, eventually coming up with a 55-foot high, 45-foot wide, three-ton whirligig of whirligigs that now towers outside the museum. Built atop a sign pole salvaged from a gas station, topped by a bicycle rider, cats and angels, and incorporating oil filters, milkshake canisters and waffle-iron parts, it prompts incredulous grins from passing tourists and draws locals to watch its wild spinning during thunderstorms…

…In Ms. [Rebecca Alban] Hoffberger, who has become a major figure in the national movement to champion the art of the self-trained, he found a “rabid fan” (her words) who once brought two busloads of his relatives up from North Carolina to admire his masterpiece. She calls Mr. Simpson one of the “true visionaries,” whose wit and genius for color and balance never fails to move people.

“You put one of his freshly painted pieces, moving as he designed it, anywhere in the world, and people will stop what they’re doing and stare and smile and say, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” Ms. Hoffberger said.

I have to give the NYT a little bit of a tough time here for not including a video slide show with this. Fortunately, we have YouTube to let us get a sense of these things the way they were meant to be experienced (minus the wind in your hair feel and the grassy aroma).

Lots of joyful things spin — Ferris wheels, Merry-go-rounds, tops, dogs chasing their tails. When it’s experienced physically, there’s something about the movement, the way it disrupts our balance and creates a transient loss of control, that triggers an unconscious sense of freedom. When it’s experienced visually, it becomes a display of unseen forces (centripetal, mostly), that is enchanting — I’m thinking here of tops and gyroscopes, spinning children and the undulating skirts of dervishes. I wonder, too, if there isn’t something happening with our mirror neurons that makes this a vicarious pleasure, that as we watch there is a part of our brains that feels it is spinning too, which leads to that visceral soaring feeling and Duchenne smile.

The wind adds another layer, another unseen force to the mix that makes pinwheels and whirligigs feel delightful. As humans we are used to power being emitted by things we can see — a hand or a motor — but the mercurial fluctuations of an invisible wind make things seem to be moving by themselves. Depending on the  other elements of the design (color, form, texture) and its context, this can be spooky (Hitchcock-esque) or, as in these examples, it can feel magical and joyful.

Images: policeman image and girls with pinwheels, via @katespadeny. Vollis Simpson images, Jeremy Lange for NYT.

NYT: Junkyard Poet of Whirligigs and Windmills

Rob Walker (of Consumed) had an interesting post on his blog recently evolving the discussion around my Psychology Today post about Unhappy Hipsters and the emotional tenor of modern design. He picks up on my assertion that delight is at root an emotion connected with abundance. In my post, I wrote:

I think that modernism’s restrained quality is fundamentally in tension with the idea of delight. Delight is an emotion of abundance — a celebration of sensation and richness. Delight and joy are primally connected to wellness, and wellness in nature is lush, plump, vibrant, and bountiful.

Walker observes that there’s often something enchanting about abundance in the context of interior design, such as in many of the homes featured in “Sneak Peeks” on the blog Design*Sponge. (The photo above is from a similar type of series: The Selby’s photos of the homes of creative people. This one is from the home of Sydney gallerist Sarah Cottier, photographer Ashley Barber, and their daughter Ruby.) We value a little abundance in the form of creative clutter because it makes a space invitingly human; collections of real things arranged at non-90 degree angles tell us we’re in a home, rather than a sanitized photo studio or furniture showroom. At the same time, Walker voices a healthy skepticism about the joys of abundance:

I am somewhat cautious about that connection between delight and abundance. Buying into that idea full-on would be emotionally catastrophic — I mean, maybe those “hipsters” are unhappy, but watch an episode of Hoarders and decide for yourself how delightful that abundance seems.

This contrast — between joyful collecting and anxious hoarding — raises some big questions that push the discussion on abundance into an important area. It’s clear there’s a line where things go from joyful plenty to horrifying excess. But where is that line? And why do many of us seem to have so much trouble staying on the healthy side of it?

A clue to our precarious relationship with abundance lies within our own brains, and the neural wiring that underpins our emotional responses. Many emotional reactions are triggered unconsciously by aesthetic (or sensory) elements. Aesthetic elements can take on different meanings through cultural encoding and personal experience, but underneath these layers there is often a kernel of biological inclination, shaped by evolution. One example, which I alluded to in my PT post, is people’s general preference for curves. A primal, unconscious part of our brain (the amygdala) has an intrinsic, background-level fear response to sharp corners, a reaction that makes sense. This emotional response raises our alertness around potentially harmful objects, and by consequence, our chances of survival. The response is purported to have developed over the more than 80,000 generations of the Pleistocene era when humans were evolving into their present form, and were surrounded by an environment where the angular things they might have encountered included cliff edges, tree branches, and predators’ claws — all things around which it’s unwise to be too cavalier.

I believe there’s a similar evolutionary principle going on with abundance, a hardwired predilection etched deep into our brains. My view is that a preference for abundance is a natural residue of generations of evolution in an environment where “too much of a good thing” conferred greater chances of survival. This is why we pig out beyond satiation at buffets and why candy stores make us feel like kids — because these things are aesthetic signifiers of a secure resource stream, something we are predisposed to celebrate and revel in.

At the same time, what was adaptive in the Pleistocene can be maladaptive in the post-industrial age, especially when taken to extremes. For most of us living in the first world, the unpredictable cycles of plenty and privation have been leveled out to such an extent that our greatest want is a lack of ripe mangoes in January. Abundance runs amok; it clogs our arteries and our atmosphere and it accumulates not just in the homes of hoarders, but throughout our environment. It hogs resources, giving some people unimaginable riches while consigning many more to persistent scarcity. This state of affairs is clearly not joyful; it’s rife with guilt, anxiety, and shame. When the population of humans was small relative to the available resources, and resources came and went in uncertain cycles, an insatiable craving for abundance made sense; now, this proclivity can be a truly destructive influence.

But our genes don’t know this. So the hardwired emotional responses that once worked so well to enhance our well-being and survival are now sometimes odds with the same ends. We stuff ourselves, shop-till-we-drop, and hoard because on some level it feels good, even if consciously we know it’s not good for us. Fortunately, we are not slaves to our genetic predispositions. While their influence over our behavior can be profound, it is modulated and controlled by a frontal cortex capable of understanding the dilemmas we face and making necessary tradeoffs. One way we do this is by exercising control over our actions, turning down a second helping or politely declining a tempting sales pitch. Another way is through the design of our environment, and this is where I think an aesthetics of abundance could be quite powerful. Can we design a feeling of abundance without the actual abundance, i.e. without having to use a lot of material, or hoard a whole ton of stuff?

What follows are a few early observations on the idea of aesthetics of abundance, along with some examples. Celebrations such as festivals are a big inspiration in this area, because they often feature abundant, yet temporary, displays, meaning they often need to feel big but be small enough to pack away later. Balloons are often used to create a sense of abundance, even though the actual material they consume is comparatively small. Confetti (though problematic in the cleanup), is another example of a product that creates a sense of abundance with little material. Surface treatments, such as patterns, can also create a feeling of abundance, particularly stripes and polka dots. I love how these stripes on the side of the Barcelona Flower Market seem to swell and move, suggesting the bounty inside:

Designer Paul Smith certainly understands this principle as well:

Another example — these polka dots from the Trash: Any Color You Like project take a feature of city life that normally fades into the background and makes it feel more abundant (an effective way to get people to reflect on the consequences of abundance!).

Variegated color and texture treatments also work to create abundance. Because of the rainbow hues, these chopsticks feel like “more” than they would if they were all one color.

A feeling of abundance can also be created with form and texture, such as with the ruffles that are in shop windows across the country right now for spring.

Abundance is not just about form, but also about context. A teaspoon of sprinkles feels abundant on an ice cream cone; in a giant field, the same teaspoon is insignificant. The cornucopia symbol is apt — abundance needs something to spill out from, a container to press against. It’s easier to make a small home feel abundant than a big one, which is a counterintuitive principle of some comfort to us small-apartment city dwellers. By designing small frames, we can make the things inside feel more bountiful. There’s also a role for design in illustrating the line between abundance and pure excess. That’s part of why the Design*Sponge “Sneak Peeks” are so satisfying. They show managed clutter, abundance in balance. Like a healthy psyche, they are full of emotional experiences, memories, and desires, arranged with some acknowledgment of a rational super-structure. Effusive, but not chaotic.

Like anything taken to extreme, abundance ceases to be joyful once it crosses a certain line. Science doesn’t offer much insight as to where the line is; we just know it when we see it. Love in excess becomes infatuation. Self-confidence becomes narcissism. Neatness becomes compulsion. Too much of any good thing is no good at all. The overstuffed houses of hoarders and the ultra-minimal, bare bones interiors featured in design magazines are two ends of a spectrum of beliefs about homes and happiness. I could just as easily take on the hoarders as the zen-modernists, except for one thing — no one is advocating the hoarder lifestyle. Even the hoarders view their condition with shame. Minimalism, on the other hand, is often preached as a lifestyle nirvana — a blissful, transcendent state achieved by letting go of material things. For some people, this kind of muted emotional landscape is a relief, a break from a high-stress job, information overload, or a plethora of buzzing devices. But for most of us, I’d contend that this kind of environment runs against our emotional nature. We’re made to feel joy in an abundance of color, texture, and sensory stimulation; it’s what makes the neurons fire and the brain grow and develop. Rather than fight it, I’d love to see us use design to create a more sustainable kind of abundance, one that gives us delight without compromising the joy of generations to come.

Images: Barcelona Flower Market via yatzer; Paul Smith Mini via Flickr; trashbags by Adrian Kondratowicz; chopsticks via DWR; ruffles: S/S 2010 shows by Oscar de la Renta, Valentino, and Colette Dinnigan, via Style.com.

Murketing: Clutter, Objects, Joy
Psychology Today / Design and the Mind: Unhappy Hipsters: Does Modern Architecture Make Us Gloomy?