aesthetics of joy

A rainbow is a pretty easy path to joy. This one involved a fair amount of work, piecing together all the appropriate hues in Pantone swatches, but the “Wow” payoff was virtually guaranteed.

I find the wide view really extraordinary. It’s like a pixelated projection, a very clever play on the digital nature of a Pantone rainbow, almost like a Photoshop add-on. The rainbow is actually more materially tangible than a real rainbow, yet viewed this way has the same textural filminess, the same unreality. I know it began as an ad stunt, but for me there is a profound and subtle comment in here about tangibility in the crossover between the digital and analog worlds.

Photos: Wandaaaa
Via Core77

I guess moss isn’t the most obviously joyful plant. It doesn’t have brightly colored, showy flowers. It doesn’t have alluring scents. You can climb it, swing from its branches or play hide-and-seek behind its trunk.

But what moss lacks in all these ways, it makes up for in the pure delight of abundant texture. Moss is one of my fingertips’ absolute favorite things to touch. Like the scene in Amélie where she plunges her hands into a sack of dried beans just to revel in the sensation, my senses derive pure joy from the soft, cushiony texture of healthy moss.

This moss appeared on the last day of the trip. It’s the dry season, and most of the Galapagos landscape is desertlike, with spindly trees, spiky cacti, and a ground cover of greyish succulents. But on the last day we headed to the highlands to seek out some tortoises, and the lush, jungle-like environment was a delight after so much dryness. Rich, tactile mosses were everywhere, but of course when traveling in a foreign place the rule is look but don’t touch, and I had to be content with just a photo.

I don’t know if some animated characters can make reading emails and making calls into a “Joyful Adventure,” but LG Australia certainly hopes so. The website for their GM730 smartphone features games in which personified apps get together to catch flying emails and do “playful multitasking,” whatever that is.

Looking at the graphic above, it’s clear they’re trying to harness elements of joyful aesthetics: the tiny claymation cupcake village, friendly color palette, cutesy language, and glimmering phone. It’s a Childhood aesthetic, designed to trigger playfulness and nostalgia. But the whole thing is just a gloss on what’s presented as an otherwise ordinary smartphone. The characters, with charmingly original names like “Dialing,” “Contact,” and “Office,” do nothing to highlight unusual features of the phone. They’re just the standard apps, often the ones you wished worked better. Seriously, Dialing? Is that even a feature?

The TV ad takes the Childhood aesthetic a step further, with puppets whose style clearly references The Muppets and a brightly-colored set that echoes Sesame Street. Another device from Sesame Street used in the ad is the intermingling of puppets and people. It all combines into an aesthetic designed to stimulate our nostalgia and bring a halo of joy to the phone. The ad ends with the line “Joy. Now in a smartphone.” spoken by a V.O. with a laugh in her voice and spelled out in a friendly, rounded typeface.

But despite the frenzy of action in the ad, nothing suggests this is any different than any other smartphone. Why will this phone, in particular, make me so happy? Answer the question, and it’s a legitimate claim. But until the emotional claim is backed up with benefits, this represents another great example of the increasingly common, increasingly global advertising phenomenon of joywashing.

Thanks Ben, for the great tip.

This is the 6th of my 14-photo series reliving joyful moments from my recent trip to the Galapagos. It’s part of an attempt to keep the vacation spirit alive a little longer, and I hope you enjoy them.

Lava lizards are underfoot on many Galapagos islands, perfectly camouflaged except for the bright spot of color under their necks. I love that peek of color.  If you look closely, you can see rust red, mint green, sunny yellow and a kind of apricot color too, all overlaid with chocolate chip-like spots. It reminds me of the joy I first felt in drawing, when I was forced to look at things really closely, and I realized how much there is at small scale in the world. If yesterday’s post was about big experiences that cause us to zoom out on the world, this one is about zooming in.

The lava lizard is among the smallest of the attractions in the Galapagos islands, and therefore often overlooked. But it’s a reminder to me that nature has way of cramming extraordinary beauty and wonder into incredibly tiny spaces.

Studio Lin airbrushed the edges of these stacks of invitations to create custom gradients. I especially love the way the color pools and mingles in the shadows, a bonus effect of the intense color planes.

Via Oh Joy!

I love the contrast between these two mobiles, illustrating different aesthetics of joy. The one on the left is celebratory — vibrant and effusive, a cloud of color. The one on the right layers two aesthetics in one: lightness and surprise — the floating, elevated feeling created by the spacing in the pure white linear structure, coupled with the whimsical burst of texture at the bottom.

And yet there are also commonalities: curvilinear, symmetrical forms, based at root in the circle; harmony and balance inherent in the idea of mobile; light, dancing movements; and of course, intense bursts of color. It continues to amaze me, as I work through this project, how consistent and yet how diverse the elements are that give rise to the aesthetics of joy.

Mobiles by Frazier & Wing
Via Daily Candy

One of the things that has struck me in all the interviews I’ve done on the subject of joy over the past 6 months or so is that many people have talked about moments of joy as moments where they felt “small.” At first I found this perplexing — it doesn’t fit with the expansive, larger-than-life, abundant nature of joy — so I dug deeper.

When talking about joy, people often talk about time spent with families, vacations, successes, and simple pleasures. They also talk a lot about experiences with nature, and often these are experiences with nature’s enormity. People talk about wrapping their arms around a giant redwood and realizing that tree has seen a world their grandparents didn’t even see, and may outlive even their grandchildren. They talk about sitting on a beach and contemplating the far horizon. They talk about stargazing and wondering at the contrast between the marvelous stillness they feel and the knowledge that they are actually hurtling through space at great speed. They talk about witnessing migrations of birds or vast schools of fish or seeing a world under a microscope.

I realized that small is about feeling in context. It’s about a realignment of perspective, an understanding that your worries about the noise your car’s muffler is making or the extra cookie you had at lunch are inconsequential. It’s a scale shift — what were big problems are now small ones. They don’t go away, they just reassume proper proportion, and in their place is a joy that comes from the freedom from all that pressure. It’s the ultimate kind of transcendence — transcendence of the self, where we can step outside the identity we continually build and inhabit and be free for a moment.

The Galapagos made me feel this way, the enormity of the sea and sky all around. Driftwood is like an artifact of this enormity, its gnarled surfaces a text of the ocean’s power written in a language we all understand. Perhaps this is why driftwood is so often collected and brought home as a souvenir. Not just because it is beautiful, but because it makes us feel joyfully small.

I would like to drive around in a car called the “Utopian Turtletop,” wouldn’t you?

That was just one of many names that emerged from a brief but joyful collaboration between the writer Marianne Moore and the Ford Motor Company in 1955. Ford approached Moore for help with naming “a rather important new series of cars” and though the names she suggested were all passed over, they still delight. Wouldn’t a “Pastelogram” be nicer to drive than a Focus? Doesn’t a “Fabergé” sound cushier than a Fusion? Ok, to be fair, perhaps the delicacy implied by that last one  doesn’t bolster the crash test rating claims, but surely all of them are better than “Edsel,” the name eventually chosen by the Ford execs.

I love the idea that poetry can lend levity to product naming. Naming in the automotive industry has become beyond bland. In the past few years or so we’ve moved away from the dull, corporate neologisms like Altima and Innova towards peppy party words like Jazz, Beat, and Fiesta that are just begging for exclamation points. They might be more upbeat, but they’re still pretty mundane. Collaboration with people who are used to using language in more joyful and flexible ways would take product manufacturers out of their comfort zone — and that could be a wonderful thing.

NYT: Poetry in Motion via @deepglamour
Image: Old Car and Truck Ads

These quirky chairs subtly yet irreverently disrupt the conventions around how chairs should be, all alike in a matching set. Their sweet variations are like the differences in family members — same DNA, different expression.

I also like this as an illustration of how a design can exemplify aesthetics of joy without most of the conventional elements: color, curvilinearity, energetic gestures, etc. There is not just one aesthetic of joy, but many different ones, all held together by a certain spirit that transcends barriers and expectations, and a deep, rediscoverable pleasure.

Family Chairs by Lina Nordqvist, available this week at MoMA

NYT: “Turning the Table on Chairs”

Eggs are a very joyful form. They represent possibility, new life, things full of energy waiting to burst out into the world and get moving. The form itself is symmetrical, balanced, and whole, suggesting comfort and stasis. But in reality an egg is just a moment in time, a moment representing potentiality rather than completion.

Can you remember back to when you first learned that birds hatched from eggs? Can you remember when you first saw it on a nature program or, if you were lucky, on a farm? Or even luckier, in the wild? It was magical. In one second, there was this hard, smooth, perfect surface, and then in another, there was a beak poking out, and then shortly after there was a real, whole birdlet cradled in a jagged egg-cup. In cooking we break an egg from the outside-in, but when you see it the way it was designed to be opened, it is startling and wonderful.

I wish I could say I saw this egg hatch, but sadly, this egg will never hatch. It was abandoned. But knowing that fact was still hard to reconcile with my visceral reaction to the sight of an egg, and all the joyful potential it represents.

From the feet up, these birds are comical. Of course the blue feet have an absurd quality (better visible here), but their faces, too, have a quizzical look that makes it seem like they are endlessly surprised to see you, surprised even just to be existing in the moment where they are. And that ridiculous name!

These boobies are all over the Galapagos, so its easy to get blasé about them. They fill the sky around you, alternately hovering on thermals and torpedoing into the water to spear an unsuspecting catch. From the boats, there is the frequent ping of a splash, followed by a surfacing and a rustle of feathers. Oh, another booby…. Where are the flamingos? But once home, they regain their odd, wonderful specialness.

This calendar works like magic, drawing just the right amount of ink each day to fill out the date. Each month is colored to fit the seasons.

Ink Calendar by Oscar Diaz via New York Magazine

Ponyo, the new film by Hayao Miyazaki, opens today nationwide, with rave reviews from NYT’s Manohla Dargis. She writes:

To watch the image of a young girl burbling with laughter as she runs atop cresting waves in “Ponyo” is to be reminded of how infrequently the movies seem to express joy now, how rarely they sweep us up in ecstatic reverie. It’s a giddy, touchingly resonant image of freedom — the animated girl is as liberated from shoes as from the laws of nature — one that the director Hayao Miyazaki lingers on only as long as it takes your eyes and mind to hold it close, love it deeply and immediately regret its impermanence.

Good question she poses. Is she right? Is it true that the movies have lately been confined to exploring the a darker or more muted range of human experience? When was the last time you saw a movie that was truly joyful?

NYT: Forces of Nature, Including Children

Peter Feld has the original Woodstock poster designed by Arnold Skolnick on his blog today, and it struck me as wonderful example of aesthetics of joy: celebration, music, and inclusiveness all so cleanly expressed with the bright colors, friendly type, and big, rounded, hand-made imagery. Truly iconic, joyful design that captured the spirit of a transformative cultural moment.

Skolnick is releasing a limited edition 40th anniversary version, though unfortunately I can’t find images of it, so I can’t tell if he’s altered it significantly. The article does give a bit of interesting history on the design of the poster, though, in case you’re interested in knowing more.

What’s happening in the world of joy this week…

Phish’s new album “Joy” will be released Sept. 8; Band announces a limited edition “Joy Box” containing 1o posters designed for each of the album’s 10 tracks and an entirely separate album called “Party Time” (Rolling Stone)

Statisticians are attempting to develop a “happiness index” using Twitter (Central Penn Business Journal)

Giddy with social networking glee, Coca-Cola has created its own abbreviated URL, a la tinyurl and bit.ly: http://cokeurl.com/. Coke says: “Coke URL is just one way we’re making happiness easier to share.” (via Peter Feld)

New study shows happiness grows with age; apparently we get better at fighting off the cold-pricklies as we get older (US News & World Report)

Joyful music festival Woodstock celebrates its 40th anniversary this weekend, stoking the nostalgia of baby boomers everywhere

Like many animals in the Galapagos, there are no guarantees with the flamingos — either they’re there or they aren’t and there isn’t much you can do if they happen to be feeding elsewhere that day. Fortunately, we lucked out, and were able to watch them graze on lunch for awhile. I choose this shot out of 40 or so flamingo photos because of the constrast in the poses of the two birds, the reflections in the still water, and the vast expanse of blue lagoon around them.

The reflections and the negative space accentuate the absurd gesture of the flamingo form and its odd proportions: the weight of the body atop implausibly skinny legs bent at awkward-seeming angles; the long, S-curved neck with the hairpin turn at the top; the chunky, toucan-esque beak; and the unlikely color, make these birds look like caricatures of themselves, like living lawn ornaments. And yet, what seems so cartoonish was transformed in an instant when the birds took flight.

Necks and legs in one smooth, undulating line, with black-fringed wings outstretched, they were not only no longer absurd. They were utterly graceful.

The headlines have been comical. “Richard Perry in the Sky With Diamonds,” reads one. “Jeff Koons’s Blinding Bling,” blares another, calling out the controversy over hedge fund founder Richard Perry’s installation of a giant green diamond-shaped sculpture by Koons on the terrace of his penthouse apartment.

Art is a terribly subjective thing, which is how you get debates such as this one, which has led to myriad complaints and has even forced Perry to shift the direction of the sculpture to prevent light reflections from its mirror-polished surface from “burning like lasers” in a neighboring penthouse. (Ah, the problems of the very rich!)

You could argue an aesthetic of joy here — the oversized scale, the delicious shininess — though perhaps it’s not so layered as joy and may be more novelty than joy. My friend Deirdre says it makes her happy, though she can see how the neighbors might not be so thrilled. When private taste impinges on public eyeballs, the line between joyful and hideous can get awfully blurry. Is a work of art or a piece of decor still joyful if it bothers some to the point of agitation?

Art supplies are an addiction of mine. I love to go into art stores and walk the aisles, running my eyes over the rainbows of pastels, crayons, and pencils. I like to choose each color individually, reading the names, and feeling all the potential of that concentrated burst of pigment I’m holding, imagining what might become of all that spruce green, lilac, or vermillion. This obsession goes back as far as I can remember. While some kids dreamed about thousand-piece Lego sets or a full collection of Beanie Babies, I craved 30 different shades of blue.

So you can imagine how this set of pencils from Social Designer sent my inner child abuzz this morning. First there is the abundance, the sheer delight of 500 pencils, more than four times as many colors as Prismacolor makes. But then you don’t get them all at once. No, you get them in stages of 25 pencils at a time. Which means you have the feeling of abundance but at the same time you get the pleasure of anticipation, waiting for your pencils in the mail, wondering which colors will come in the next batch, dreaming about what you’ll do with them.

The batches create new forms of inspiration. With 500 colors you could be overwhelmed, but if this month the yellows arrive then perhaps you will be inspired to work in that palette and see where the color leads you. I also love to imagine what the set will look like when complete, because you will have had more time with some colors, you will have found favorites, and they will be shaved down to all different lengths. At the moment the set is complete, it is already in the process of being consumed.

When you buy a set all together, the set is complete at the beginning and is whittled away. As you make art, the set is slowly dissolving. But when the pencils arrive in stages, it’s like an evolving collection, and the art and the tools evolve together alongside each other.

As a writer, I also love the names. Of course, I love traditional pigment names too: ultramarine, scarlet lake, burnt umber, yellow ochre, and the already-mentioned vermillion. These names come from traditional natural and chemical pigments, and even if they are no longer made in those old ways, I love the connection to the past they imply. But the names of these pencils are deeply evocative and emotional, much in the way that CB‘s fragrance names are. I wonder about the smells of Burning Leaves, In the Library, and Memory of Kindness just as I wonder what I would draw with the colors Lobster, Mrs. Smith, Drizzly Afternoon, and Chicanery.

Via Daily Candy

You know when you come back from a vacation so good you just wish you could relive it over and over again? Well, over the next 14 days I’m going to be reliving my most joyful encounters with wildlife in the Galapagos, one photo each day.

The waved albatross of the Galapagos mates for life. As adults, they spend most of their lives alone at sea, but each year they meet on the same island to mate and nest. Their period of reacquaintance includes a complex dance where male and female bow to each other and click their beaks together.

I know birds have famously small brains, and perhaps it’s an anthropomorphic fallacy to attribute emotion to a behavior that is so clearly coded as instinct. But, I can’t help but see joy and love in the eyes of these birds as they perform these rituals.

The full set of my Galapagos photos (about 60 or so) appears in my Flickr photostream, in case you want to check them out.

Nice op-ed piece by Michael Gerson in today’s Washington Post about the “joyful revolution” that the Special Olympics created in our country’s treatment of intellectually disabled people. He writes about the transformation the opportunity to participate and triumph in competitive sport wrought on the cultural understanding of these people, who previously had been “among the most isolated, overlooked and oppressed citizens in America, often hidden in remote institutions, restrained and medicated, unacknowledged by their families.”

“It was America’s most joyful civil rights movement,” he writes, “a revolution of play.” A very powerful tribute, and a wonderful example of the success of joyful activism, which transformed a culture and still continues to transform individuals day after day.

There is a deeply moving recording from a speech given by Eunice Kennedy Shriver on the Special Olympics website right now. It’s only about a minute and well worth a listen.

WP: The Joyful Revolution