aesthetics of joy

Happy accidents — coincidences — are among the more joyful phenomena out there. Take this one, for example. Girl is photographed while taking a photo. Boy posts aforementioned photo on Flickr, which girl stumbles upon, also being a Flickr member. Boy and girl meet and start dating and are still dating two years later.

These sorts of coincidences happen every day, and yet they give us a soaring sense of joy, even when they’re happening to someone else. I think this is because of the phenomenon of improbability, which makes unlikely events seem meaningful. Coincidences are actually statistically more likely than we would guess them to be, a gap between belief and reality which leads to many opportunities for wonder and joy. Our desire for our world to have meaning and for our own lives to be special trumps our brain’s ability to calculate accurately, one of many examples where emotion trumps reason in the way we perceive the world.

Witnessing a happy coincidence in someone else’s life gives us hope for that same random, unlikely joy in our own lives. It is a case where joy comes not from the memory of a prior pleasurable event but from the hope and anticipation of a future one. As the many comments for the photo attest, people are uplifted by the narrative, and it brings out warm feelings.

Of course, not all coincidences are happy ones. Dick Cavett recently wrote in the New York Times about a particularly horrifying one. But with the grace of an irrepressible optimism, we seem more able to chalk these negative coincidences up to chance. Perhaps this means we’re wired to seek and find joy, whatever the odds?

The moment I knew joy had “tipped” (i.e. reached its point of mass cultural relevancy) came earlier this month when I received my copy of Dwell magazine. The magazine had an overleaf on top of the regular cover with what looked like colored tire tracks and on the underside a simple link: ExpressionOfJoy.com. Given the name I rushed to my computer and entered the URL. What popped up, as you’ll see if you click through, is a BMW promotional site featuring what looks like a child’s drawing but is actually a giant “car painting” done with a Z4 and gallons of primary colored paint on a giant canvas.

The site shows the making of the painting in elegant time-lapse fashion, from the laying of the special paneled canvas through the creation of the artwork, with the paint spraying out from jets over the wheels. It’s fun to watch, beautiful, and certainly novel, but is it joy?

Joy, in word and intention, has been popping up all over these days, and this marketing gimmick from BMW is only the latest. Recent Pepsi ads have been using the word joy (among other happy words) with the “O” replaced by the new Arnell-designed Pepsi logo. Joy was in evidence on the cover of this year’s New York magazine design issue, featuring a nude woman gleefully throwing a gallon of fluourescent pink paint at a white wall. This week’s New York Time’s T style magazine proclaims that the Milan furniture fair was all about joy. And then there are the new brands that keep popping up with joy in the name or tagline, like Tipjoy, an app that allows you to send money via Twitter.

Of course, joy has always been a theme in our culture — witness Almond Joy, Joy dishwashing liquid, and the Joy of Cooking, as well as the many joy campaigns that flood the airwaves during the holidays — but there does seem to be a rising current of joy right now, and it’s not hard to understand why. When life is uncertain and hardship abounds, happiness may be a difficult concept to grab ahold of, but little peaks of joy are easy to aspire to. You may not be able to afford a the home you’d like, but a sunny day strolling the park is an always-accessible mood-lifter.

All of these examples, new and old, include aesthetic features we associate with joy — saturated colors, bright imagery, expressions of freedom and play — but sometimes looks can be deceiving. The BMW campaign is interesting to me because I feel it falls shy of the mark on joy. It is an enjoyable spectacle, to be sure, a fun example of the inner child let loose. But while it is wonderful on the first watching, on the second and third the emotional impact is noticeably diminished. The pleasure is in getting the joke, understanding how its made and marveling at the process. But the pleasure of the product is lacking in depth, and the piece plays like a novelty. Joy must be repeatable, and perhaps I am cynical, but I wonder if I saw this again in a year if it would inspire any emotional reaction at all.

Which is not to say I don’t like it. I really appreciate when companies engage the arts and try to raise the level of discourse and differentiation around their brands. Kohler and Bombay Sapphire have done this well, in my opinion. I do question whether this particular idea is necessarily on brand for BMW (a subject for another column, perhaps), and whether the naming was well thought out, or merely an attempt to glom on to the current trend towards joy.

It’s magic month in the world of Aesthetics of Joy. I’m currently working on the chapter about magic and joy, which is all about the transcendence of natural law and human limits. One of the greatest constraints we face as humans is gravity, so it’s no surprise that a lot of joyful things happen to defy it. Unable to fly naturally ourselves, we derive a lot of joy from assisted flight (planes, hanggliders, hot air balloons) and from surrogates (kites, bubbles, birds).

The magic of kites lies partly in this defiance of gravity, but also in the way it plays with another human limit: visibility. As our dominant sense, vision is something we trust without question, but human vision actually operates within a pretty narrow range. We have trouble seeing anything smaller than 1/20th of a millimeter with the naked eye. So even though we know that air is not actually “empty” but rather filled with invisible particles that are constantly being moved around by wind and convection currents, we can’t see these in action. There is, then, a magic in anything that manages to make these invisible forces visible.

The unpredictable dance of a kite reveals these hidden forces in a beautiful, joyful way. And the design of kites, while deeply functional, is also geared towards aesthetically enhancing this emotional experience. Kite designers design for the wind, for the spectacle created by the kite’s movements, adding loose tails or wings that magnify the gyrations of the form. Color, usually bright and saturated, is used to draw maximum attention. And though there is poetry in a simple diamond kite, kite designers are going ever bigger and more intricate in their quest to provide a joyful spectacle.

These features are clearly in evidence among the kites exhibited last night at the FlyNY kite auction. Founded by a trio of architects, FlyNY is a kite-making competition and kite-flying festival aimed at bridging the gap between the design community and everyday New Yorkers, and bringing joy through the pleasure of kite-flying. The non-profit held their inaugural festival earlier this month in Riverside park, and hundreds of families showed up to make simple paper kites, while the more hardcore brought their own finely crafted designs. Yesterday, the kites were exhibited and auctioned off at the Knoll showroom to benefit Architecture for Humanity.

I’ll be interviewing FlyNY founder Victoria Walsh next week, so look for more kite thoughts then! You can see images from the kites and the festival here.

A friend sent me this fascinating article from June’s Atlantic on the Grant Study, a 60+ year exploration into what makes people live happy and fulfilled lives. In some ways, this long-term macro focus is the opposite of my work, which looks at the micro, the momentary flashes of delight in our lives. But there’s a common goal, to understand the underpinnings of positive emotion, and to understand how to create more of it.

The most interesting aspect of the article to me is how the writer and the scientist grapple with the inconsistencies in the data, the people who had every reason to be happy but turned miserable, or the people who led underwhelming lives but looked back on them with beatific satisfaction. These paradoxes recall others in the study of happiness, namely this oft-cited one also mentioned in the article: “How is it that children are often found to be a source of “negative affect” (sadness, anger)—yet people identify children as their greatest source of pleasure?”

I wonder if the answer lies in the moment to moment nature of life, and of joy. Children bring moments of joy, even if they also bring other effects (like less time for other passions, tiredness from keeping up with them, and certain relationship stresses and conflicts) and the intensity of those moments outweighs longer periods of feeling other emotions. Certain experiences occupy disproportionate amounts of space in our memories, such that 2 weeks of vacation a year holds more emotional memory value than 50 weeks of work.

I’d go further to speculate that the pleasurable experiences that constitute joy tend to be richer in sensory value than our everyday experiences, both because of their natural intensity and because of the relative difference between them and the sensations to which we’ve become habituated. So perhaps in storage and on recall they activate more brain regions than normal memories? I don’t know, I’m not an authority in this area, but it’s a question for the neuroscientists…

One of the questions people ask me all the time when I explain the Aesthetics of Joy is “How do I use this?” The book covers a number of specific strategies relating to designing and marketing more joyfully, but there’s one that’s almost too obvious to write about: having a joyful attitude.

The fail whale, Twitter’s now iconic graphic that appears during unplanned, accidental downtime, is a great example of this. When most sites go down they use a stock standard “We’re having technical difficulties and are working to resolve the problem. We apologize for the inconvenience.” Nothing wrong with that, but nothing joyful about it either. Twitter’s approach, on the other hand, to use whimsical imagery to convey the idea of overloaded servers, creates a small moment of transcendence in the user. By this I mean that the ordinary pattern of behavior (anger, frustration, percussive maintenance) is suspended because the enchanting vehicle of the message takes you out of your narrow prism and makes you consider that stepping away from the computer into the sunshine for a few hours might not be such a bad idea. Fail whale is a disruption that shifts your perspective, mood, and even behavior.

Fail whale seem to fill a cultural need for joy and humanity in our dealings with the corporate world, as evidenced by the craze it inspired, including t-shirts, sculptures, tattoos, and cupcakes. It’s become an emblem of joyful failure, a true disruption of our expectations around the ways in which companies behave.

Joyful design doesn’t change the message. But it can change the way the message is received, and the way users feel about your product. And if you have to disappoint your users, a dose of joy might just be the best way to sugar-coat it.

Fail whale is designed by Yiying Lu. More info here.

Bubblewrap is one of those odd cases of joy that has had me puzzling for a while. It has some of the superficial attributes associated with other joyful things—the transparency and roundness of bubbles, for example. But holding it against my definition of joy, (“a pleasureable transcendence of expectations”) it doesn’t seem to stand up. After you’ve experienced bubblewrap once, you know what it’s going to do; your expectations are set and there’s no real surprise there. And yet it doesn’t take away from that intensely satisfying little “pop.”

So why is the experience of bubblewrap so joyful? Part of it has to do with the unpredictability of the exact instant of the pop. In the moment of contact between thumb and bubble, you’re not aware of it, but your brain is adjusting the pressure and trying to make a prediction about exactly when that pop is going to happen. Even though you know it’s coming, it’s always a surprise on some level, in the same way as a jack-in-the-box or the big “Boo!” in a horror flick.

But I didn’t really understand why bubblewrap was so universally accepted as joyful (it has over 800,000 fans on Facebook, and someone has even developed a bubblewrap iPhone app) until I hit upon a new category of joy: transgression. Joyful transgressions are actions that violate conventions or rules in a pleasurable way, without harmful side effects. So, for example, eating dessert before dinner is a harmless, pleasurable transgression, and has a joyful quality to it, while stealing a candy bar from a convenience store might be pleasurable, but is not joyful because someone else is harmed in the process.

Popping bubblewrap plays into this idea of joyful transgression in two ways. First, it’s destructive, because bubble wrap is only functional while intact, but it’s a harmless destruction because the consequences are so trivial. And second, it’s noisy, so each loud burst makes public the destructive act. In this way, there’s something comically illicit about popping bubblewrap, and therefore joyful.

I’m curious what a bubblewrap manufacturer would think of all this, and how demand for the product is evolving given the newer, more environmentally gentle solutions, and I think I’m going to seek one out for a short interview. I’m sure all this talk has made you want to find some bubblewrap to pop, so good luck raiding the neighbors’ discarded packages. In the meantime, content yourself with a marginally satisfying online version.

5/14: How does the Met keep their sculptures so shiny?

3/6: Rainbow sightings and joy in the natural vs. built environment

3/1: Hidden color

2/20: What is joy?

2/13: The joy of intangible color

2/11: Defining joy: some early thoughts

2/11: Joy and expectation

2/10: Plutchik’s emotional taxonomy

2/10: Aesthetics of Joy

After 5 months working on the research and theory behind Aesthetics of Joy, it’s become clear that there’s so much to say on the topic that the project needs its own home. So welcome to the new site for Aesthetics of Joy.

The book is well underway, and over the weeks and months to come I’ll be sharing some of the key insights that underpin the book’s argument, as well as excerpts from interviews and commentary on joy sightings in the worlds of design, marketing, media, and popular culture.

For a fuller introduction to the project, check out this summary. If you have thoughts on joy you want to share, email me.