I didn’t realize the MTA was putting joyful messages on the backs of metro cards but I think it’s a lovely idea. At least if people can’t be bothered to bin their garbage, the rest of us can get a momentary boost!
Here’s an interesting project from Orlagh O’Brien about the associations we form with emotions and the ways we express them. The project consists of maps of colors, words, and shaded bodies that show how and where people feel certain emotions. He says:
By gathering concepts of feeling by word, colour and line and creating visual languages for anger, joy, fear, sadness and love – a kind of democratic visual language is created – a backwards-brand. As a graphic designer, I am attempting to bring attention to the body’s patterns of feeling and innate intelligence in a systematic but playful way.
To me the color map says it all. Yellow and other bright, light colors for joy, dark muted colors for fear and sadness, and intense warm colors for the fiery emotions love and anger. It’s like a visual glossary for emotion.
I love this project because it makes a point I frequently am called upon to reiterate in the process of writing Aesthetics of Joy. People often tell me that joy is individual and personal, and that it’s impossible to come up with a consensus on what the aesthetics of joy are. Indeed, if you look at these color maps, you can see that some people find joy in intense red (the same red others associate with anger) and some people find joy in the kind of kelly green that makes others fall in love. But, overall, when you put all these people together, there’s a feeling that emerges that makes a kind of sense. It may be tyranny of the majority, but well over half of the joyful colors are warm, nearly all are saturated and pure, and none are black, maroon, navy, or gray. It may not be a universal consensus, but it’s a vibe that we see and intuitively feels right.
The graphics are also beautiful. They strike me as pH strips for emotion, as if you could take the emotional temperature of a culture, and it would come out like this. Very interesting work.
See the full joy page here.
Squeezing brightly dressed performers into tight urban spaces, Companie Willi Dorner creates surprising living sculptures. Dorner aims to shift our perspective and cause us to reflect on the scale and structure of our environment. As much as the contrast between the rigid environment and flexible performers illuminates some basic truths about the design of buildings and spaces, I think the more interesting revelations relate to behavior.
Like the flash mobs I wrote about earlier this week, the behaviors force us to question the unspoken norms that govern behavior in a society. The positions and arrangements of the performers violate these norms in striking and significant ways. They’re too close together, they’re entwined and contorted, they’re upside down, they’re horizontal, they’re in places forbidden by law or general good taste to occupy. Encountering these behaviors reveals a second layer of structure in a city: an invisible structure formed by codes of behavior that work as well as fences or street markings to maintain our orderly coexistence. The photo below, of the blue-clad person upside-down against the gridded wall, shows this beautifully — an irreverent subversion of both kinds of order.
Something like this is a little piece of chaos, and it can be done in disturbing fashion, or it can be done whimsically. Clearly this is an example of the latter, with color a primary cue to the artist’s intent. There’s a real sense of play here, like a game of hide-and-seek (or in the first photo, sardines) being conducted in plain sight. It would be fun to witness, but I think out of anyone the greatest joy belongs the performers, who have license to indulge their inner child and color outside the lines for a day.
via PSFK
Wonderful project idea from Sandra Juto. A surprise ball containing little treasures hidden by wrapping in crepe paper. You can buy them from Kiosk, or make one yourself. It would be a wonderful gift, especially for a child. It kind of reminds me of how my uncle once tricked me by giving me a little present packed in tons of nested boxes. Except as a kid you always think bigger is better, so there was a little disappointment factor to it. This is much nicer because you get little presents the whole way along.
Photos: Sandra Juto, via Oh Happy Day!
Charles Spearin finds music in the cadences of voices speaking in their usual ways. He interviews his neighbors about happiness and searches out the hidden melodies that underlie what they’re saying. Then he sets these to music.
He calls his work the Happiness Project, which you can find more info about here. Thanks for the tip, Mere!
Choose your friends wisely: new research says they can make you happy (or fat, or a cancer-stick-sucking addict for that matter). We’ve known since at least Darwin that joy is contagious in a momentary sense — smiling or laughing often causes others to engage in the same behavior and share the pleasure of a particular experience. But this new research suggests a more durable social influence in determining positive emotion.
Interestingly, the article also suggests that positive emotion is more contagious than negative emotion. So while it pays to start hanging out with your friends in the rose-colored glasses, it doesn’t mean you have to drop the Debbie downers entirely.
NYT: Is Happiness Catching?
In another interesting piece of news today, French president Nicolas Sarkozy says France will incorporate happiness measures into their GDP. Though it sounds a little like the touchy-feely Bhutanese accounting method on the surface, the new method is the brainchild of Nobel Prize-winning US economist Joseph Stiglitz. The revised indicators account for the economic benefits of welfare systems, holidays, and environmental measures, correcting what many see as a bias towards productivity at any social and ecological cost in the current figures.
FT: France to Count Happiness in GDP
I’m a big fan of Christoph Niemann’s Abstract City blog on the NYT. His post on the supposedly simple pleasure of sleep makes me laugh, but it also makes me think seriously about the design of joyful experiences. These graphics may be a sweet, comical way of representing subjective human experience, but they’re also a brilliant way to distill out elements of experience for any kind of designer. What I’m trying to say is that they may be created as art, but they function as a tool.
Time as an axis reveals much. I love the oscillation of the “cool pillow” — a perfect sine wave illustrating how a little peak of joy can be reached again and again from a small, sensory pleasure.
Enjoy: Good Night and Tough Luck
An email from a reader got me thinking again about joyful behavior. I’ve written before about joyful behavior in the form of random acts of kindness and other unexpected actions. These are often 1-to-1 or 1-to-many exchanges, and done with a certain level of intention.
Flash mobs are another form of joyful behavior, but rather than focusing on making one or a few people feel good, they’re focused on collective enjoyment at a large scale. For those who haven’t encountered this phenomenon, a flash mob is a public spectacle usually organized by email, Facebook, Twitter, text, and other social networking technologies and services. Flash mobs gather groups of random people to do unusual things, such as ride the subway with no pants on, host a subway station art gallery, have a pillow fight, blow bubbles, or do a huge coordinated dance routine. This phenomenon has become so popular that you can find more than a couple MJ-themed flash mobs with little effort, and lots of events that require at least a marginal suppression of dignity.
It may not always be in good taste, but it’s usually in good humor, and good fun if you’ve ever experienced one. My dad and I walked through Times Square during this year’s Bubble Battle, and felt first hand the joy of a place we know well entirely transformed by the odd, but welcome spectacle. Flash mobs are also a wonderful way to experience the contagiousness of joy in action. Watching the videos you first notice a few bewildered looks from the immediate passersby, followed by smiles and whispers to companions. Others, who may not have noticed the spectacle, see the reactions of those around them and snap to attention, and you can watch as the processing happens in their brains, and the smiles spread across their faces too. Like a water ripple, joy spreads outward in concentric waves. Confusion turns to delight, and then comes back in on itself, as people converge to get a closer look. Then cameras emerge and text messages are sent, propelling the ripple even wider.
When people talk about the rise of flash mobs, they always talk about social media. But social media are only the enabler; what interests me is the drive. Media are the how, not the why, and the why is an infinitely more interesting question. I believe the rise of these events is driven by a craving for joy in everyday life, a desire to let the inner child out to play in a way that feels free. It’s a drive for connection, for tactile experiences, for oddity among the homogenized landscape, for reprieve not just from recession but from all of the rigidities and pressures of adult life. It’s a desire to participate in something where the outcome is uncertain and unimportant, because the experience is about being in the moment. And it’s not just about being in moments, but about creating moments that are worth being in, more worth being in than moments spent in front of the TV or swiping your card at a cash register. It attracts people of all ages and lifestyles because this is a deeply human need.
It is a wonder when technology provides opportunities for the new satisfaction of emotional needs; but because emotional needs can be repressed, rechanneled, and hidden for long periods of time, their sudden satisfaction can make it look like they are new needs, rather than long-buried ones. Flash mobs, in their absurd way, make us conscious of this latent craving for serendipity in our culture and ourselves.
For more on flash mobs:
NewMindSpace
ImprovEverywhere
Thank you to Riaz for the link to the Sound of Music flash mob and inspiration for this post
Patterns give me joy, and this quiz from @Issue magazine suggests that they bring joy to many cultures around the world as well. The quiz asks you to match the patterns above with the nationalities that created them, showing the diversity and distinctiveness of the ways we express ourselves in non-linguistic 2d terms. The differences interest me less than the fact that all cultures seem driven to create in this way; to abstract, in varying degrees, our essential experiences into color, line, shape, and repetition.
Take the full quiz here.
Via Joyful Delight
Someone turned me on to photographer Massimo Vitali this week, and I can’t stop looking at his fascinating images of Italian beach culture. Viscerally, there’s something immediately appealing about the slightly sun-bleached color palette and the way the images manage to be both peaceful and bustling with activity at the same time. It’s hard to see at this scale, but because Vitali shoots large-format, the images are incredibly detailed, so much so that he considers them to be compositions of portraits. In an interview with LensCulture magazine (audio here), he describes the role of the human element in his decision to press the shutter.
And then it comes a moment. Because in fact all the pictures are taken in a very little amount of time. And obviously, I follow stories and things. I look at the people, people that interest me and that pick up my fantasy, and I say, “Oh, what is she doing? Why is she looking at her?” and so I start to make connections, and when I see a certain number of these connections taking place, then I shoot. Because I want to, I try to have the picture as complicated as I possibly can.
His photos are actually compositions of stories, tons of little narratives distilled into light and color, and there is joy in the abundance of it, the way you can simply get lost in the contemplation of other lives in their leisure. This idea of complexity is fascinating, because we don’t normally associate it with joy. We think of joys as simple pleasures, but when we think about simple pleasures, we often fail to recognize how sensorially complex they are. We simplify a day at the beach to sun, sand, saltwater.
But the sun has a feel that is particular to a latitude, a time of day, even the melanin composition in a particular person’s skin. Sand has texture and color (different everywhere), micro and macroscopic scale, hidden stones and shells that may be jewel-like treasures. Saltwater has smell and taste, temperature, and translucent color so mottled and varied it’s like a world in itself. Before we even get beyond the setting, the beach proves to be a deeply complex pleasure. This complexity is one of the things that makes joy renewable. It explains why the same settings can trigger powerful emotions over and over again. Just like gazing at a Vitali portrait-scape, each time you return to something that gives you joy, there’s always the likelihood you’ll discover something new.
The NYT had a cute piece on bento boxes in this week’s Dining section. Kyaraben, the making of cute lunch boxes for children, rises to the level of art form in Japan. I found these on the Flickr photostream of a mom who makes these weekly for her kids. I think the hungry caterpillar one is irresistible, and the pandas had me at hello. A great example of aesthetics of joy applied to food. I’d be willing to bet that the food in those boxes tastes better than it would if it were just thrown in there too.
I’ve been meaning to do a post on joyful blankets for awhile, but today the gray, rainy weather really has me craving coziness. So put away the snuggie and wrap yourself up in something with a little more style and texture. Clockwise from top left: Uzbek suzanis, each one of a kind from L’Aviva Home; Saddle blankets from Roxtons; Ladak recycled moving blankets, embellished with ribbon and lace, available at Reform School; Vintage striped Moroccan blankets; Hand-crocheted Granny Square throw by Sandra Juto; Vintage Bolivian frasadas from Twine.
Enjoy your weekend. Stay warm and happy!
xx Ingrid
Yesterday I posted on miniature sweets and the perspective shift that comes from out-scaled items. On the opposite extreme, giant sweets seem to captivate artists and designers the world over. And because their enormity makes them impossible to overlook, the giant objects seem to have an even stronger Alice-in-Wonderland effect.
Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s Dropped Cone makes me feel like a Lilliputian living in a land where if I’m lucky, I might catch a dripping from a giant toddler’s melting ice cream. Martha Friedman’s Waffle (currently on view here in Brooklyn) and street artist Celso’s Apples have the similar effect of making me reconsider my own scale and the scale of all the common objects around me.
Of course, scale shifts can go both ways. Oversized objects can have the effect of making us feel ill at ease with our place in the universe and out of control of the events that shape our lives. Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s Knife Slicing Through Wall sculpture highlights this darker side of scale shifting. But sweets are inherently joyful — the sugar, the color, the aroma of baking, the ritual of eating — so giant treats create a much more pleasurable transformation of perspective: magical, childlike, and fun.
Brooklyn designer and studiomate of mine Azusa Hirota brings this whimsical quality to functional objects, allowing interaction with these giant sweets, instead of just viewing. Her chair, a giant cupcake, puts the user in between the cake and icing, so that you’re literally surrounded by the experience. Everyone I’ve seen sitting in it seems to have a big smile on their face. Her giant doughnut, designed in collaboration with Tawny Hixson, transforms a common inner tube into an object of delight. I remember my days spent tubing down the Nam Song river in Vang Vieng, Laos, and it strikes me that it would have been such a wonderful thing to see fellow travelers drifting gently downstream on giant Krispy Kremes!
See more of Azusa’s work here. Thank you Maggie, for the waffle tip that inspired the idea for this whole post!
Did I miss any wonderful giant sweets out there? Let me know.
I’m glad Stéphanie Kilgast mentions that these delicious-looking treats are 1:12 scale on her Flickr page, because otherwise I would be calling to ask how she could FedEx over some of those macaroons from Paris. Unfortunately you can’t eat these tiny cakes, but you can buy them on her Etsy page, or gaze admiringly at the many others on her photostream.
I’ve written about miniaturization before on the site, and why we seem to love tiny things. It’s a phenomenon I trace back to childhood and the downscaling of all the elements of real life into toys. As adults, tiny things give us an Alice-in-Wonderland kind of perspective shift. They make us aware of our scale, and allow us to see things in a new way. (They’re also just pretty darn cute.)
Thanks to Lisa at My Artful Life for the tip!
This house is a great example of the way pops of color on a white or neutral canvas create an aesthetic sense of joy. Writer Douglas Coupland’s polychrome collections could look like a circus in a house with a lot of color. Showcasing them against a mostly white or otherwise muted background creates moments of intense color with enough room to breathe.
In this way, design should mimic emotion. You don’t want to be feeling intense joy all the time — it would be exhausting, and it wouldn’t be possible to appreciate it. As one wave of joy recedes, you want a little bit of stillness, the rest that allows you to rediscover the joy and feel it all over again. This principle echoes the Japanese aesthetic idea of ma, the white space that is essential to any composition or design. Ma can be spatial or temporal, visual or textural, and in all cases results in an emotional feeling that allows a design to achieve the right level of poignancy.
Another joyful aspect is the unexpected nature and placement of these collections. Mundane spools of thread are elevated to high art by their gridded placement on a white wall. Dice, when laid out above an entryway, become a surprising lintel. Taken out of their usual context, these objects become fodder for unanticipated moments of delight.
NYT: The House Next Door, via Ouno
Where do I begin with describing the joy of Polaroids? There’s the magic of the technology, which unlike many high-tech innovations manages to be enchanting long past the point of newness. There’s the delight of instant gratification coupled with a delicious (almost torturous) anticipation. And then there’s the experience itself, the sheer pleasure of the image emerging, first a ghostly impression, then full color, out of a sort of muddy brown nothingness.
Digital cameras bring joy too, of course. Our first encounters with that technology were certainly magical, though its proliferation has made them less so. You can relive that initial joy and remind yourself how wondrous digital photography is by traveling to the most remote places with a digital camera. In 2006, my then-boyfriend and I were admiring a donkey in rural Kyrgyzstan when its owner came along and invited me to give it whirl. The man joined me in a photo and I’ll never forget how his eyes lit up at seeing the photo displayed on that tiny screen. We rarely have the opportunity to feel that way anymore, but digital photography still has its joys — they just come from other attributes. For example, the scale of digital technology is such that we can carry it with us everywhere, so we never miss a joyful moment. And because we can take zillions of shots for free, without even thinking about it, digital photography lends itself to more spontaneous, unexpected results.
But Polaroid has a few joyful features that the weensy camera in my iPhone can’t hope to match. First, the Polaroid is a real thing, an artifact. The Polaroid spits out a real picture (and does so with that exciting ejector noise). The picture is a real, tangible thing. It has weight and texture, smell and sheen. It interacts with light, reflecting it off its glossy surface. It interacts with the hands, showing fingerprints and odd effects if you touch the surface during the developing process. A digital photo feels ethereal; it’s an image, but not a picture. It engages just our vision, while a Polaroid engages all our senses. (Well, except taste. I hope.)
The Polaroid does the instant gratification of digital one better by incorporating a tiny interval, a delay that allows our anticipation to build. Studies have shown that interruptions or delays preceding a desired event make the event more pleasurable when it occurs. So while that wait for the image to come through tries our patience, it actually makes for a more joyful rush when the image actually appears.
The interval suggests another joyful feature of Polaroid, to me the most important one. Polaroid is not just a product, but a process. This is essential to the notion of joy. People don’t derive joy from products; they derive joy from experiences. A product is static. It can only create joy through its contribution to an experience — the experience of using it (hula hoop), wearing it (pair of shoes), doing something fun with it (golf clubs), interacting with others through it (phone), contemplating it (art), and so on. Objects that suggest or prescribe an experience are more likely to be joyful than others. But objects can also incorporate experience into their very essence, their matter, and this is transcendent. Polaroid is one of those rare products that embodies an experience. Every Polaroid picture is a unique show, a one-act play of light and color whose action unfolds silently in front of the user. That process reflects the experience you just had when you took the photo, when the moment crystallized in front of you as photo-worthy, when the players assumed just the right poses, when you depressed the shutter and made it permanent. The image emerges, a transformed vision of 3-5 minutes ago, as the most beautiful kind of déjà vu.
Which is all to say that I’m very pleased about the renaissance of the Polaroid that seems to be happening these days. Urban Outfitters is now selling Polaroid film, and I just founded these gorgeous Polaroid notecards (above) on the always charming Jars of Cute (available at Fred Flare). To me it’s less a manifestation of retro nostalgia than a craving for tangible, joyful experiences, something I think we all can use a little more of in our lives.
I’m really enjoying this redux of the City of Melbourne identity by Landor Sydney. Some permutations remind me a little of the Andy Gilmore piece I posted last week. I especially appreciate that Landor shared the grid so we can see how they constructed the system. It’s a nice way of allowing one mark to express itself in different ways, bringing in lots of color and vibrancy without losing cohesion.
From an aesthetics of joy perspective, this sort of “theme and variation” identity makes a lot of sense. The theme keeps the whole thing recognizable, while the variations trigger a constant sense of surprise and anticipation. And it makes very good sense for a city, which is going to be applying the mark to everything from street signs to parking tickets. This is something people are going to be seeing a lot; it wouldn’t take long for them to get sick of a dull mark. Overall, I think it has a really great energy.
This joyful roof, tweeted by @design_sponge and found on MandR, sent me off in search of others. My mind first went to the marvelous glazed tiled roofs in Burgundy, such as the one in the upper left below, from the Hospices de Beaune. It looks to me a like a carpet laid out. Then I remembered China, and the amazing color and texture of many palace roofs, like the large image in the middle. A Flickr search uncovered many more joyful roofs, with wonderfully textured tiles, light-capturing glass, wavy forms, and the charming patina of old age. And how could I forget the exuberant sails of the Jorn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House.
A roof is often a forgotten element of home design. I grew up in a home that had those dull gray-black shingles, the kind that felt like sandpaper while I was climbing it (to my father’s chagrin). But that common oversight makes it all the more surprising and delightful when you come across a special one.
Images left to right and top to bottom: Polar lights, miuenski, Guy Hunkin, ruthness, Manuel Barroso Parejo, ~morsus~, anneinparis16, Alex E. Proimos.
My best friend is in town from London this weekend, and we have a whole day to ourselves and a whole city to explore. I’m pretty sure ice cream will be on the agenda.
I’ve known Annie longer than I’ve known ice cream, even. We’ve been best friends since we met in nursery school, at the age of two. Once we got driver’s licenses we would regularly bounce between Ben & Jerry’s and Friendly’s, thanking our metabolisms all the way. At Friendly’s we had standard orders: a peanut butter cup sundae for me, a mint chip sundae with butterscotch sauce and gummy bears for Anne. (Which I still think is gross.) Last time she came to town we had a wild goose chase across Manhattan looking for a mythical Friendly’s (save yourself some time, Manhattanites — there isn’t one). It’s one thing we can count on in our ever-changing lives; we will both always be up for a cone, anytime, anywhere.
So this NYT review of the city’s gourmet ice cream carts is perfectly timed. I think 87 flavors is a bit excessive even for us, so it’s nice to be able to cut to the chase. I’d say that Cookshop’s strawberry would go perfectly with a visit to the High Line…
Happy long weekend — enjoy the last taste of summer!
The Lomo story is one of joyful discovery. The Lomo experience is one of joyful freedom.
The Lomo is an incredibly highly light-sensitive Russian camera. For this reason, it was rumored to be used as a spy camera by the KGB, since it could take pictures without flash even at night. In the 90s, the camera was out of production, and was discovered by some Viennese students at an old camera shop. Upon developing the film, they realized that Lomo created intensely saturated colors with ordinary film — very unusual images they started calling Lomographs.
The students managed to convince the factory to reopen production, and the popularity of the camera soared. They introduced a variety of new models, based on the premise that Lomography should be all about having fun. To that end, they created a society to promote their “no rules” approach to photography, hosting exhibitions and creating an international community. Their mantra is “Don’t Think, Just Shoot” and you can see that this irreverent approach produces a certain spontaneity in the images.
Lomo’s a great example of an ethos embodied in a product. Lomo designers use color, simplified operation, and retro styling to reinforce their whimsical approach. Many cameras advertise themselves as being for serious photographers. Lomo’s counterculture approach is liberating. You don’t worry about what setting your f-stop is on. And you don’t feel like a dunce because you shoot automatic on a camera capable of millions of possible combinations of settings. You just shoot, knowing that whatever you’re capturing will be transformed into something entirely different by the Lomo’s serendipitous lens.
I had an LC-A (the original model) once, but sold it when I got tired of film. Now I’m hankering for one again, because the pictures have such a beautifully perspective-shifting effect on your view of the world. I’d get the photos back after waiting for them to be developed and think, wow, was that day really that bright? Was the ocean that blue? In my lomo-ized memories, it always will be.
