aesthetics of joy

When I moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn, I discovered something I had missed without realizing it: the sounds of the birds. Now that I live on the top floor of a brownstone with a lush, critter-friendly backyard, I find myself at ear-level with the most amazing array of birds. This morning they were really going nuts, reveling in the warm cloudy day. I captured a few of their calls to share with you.

I’m off the Met to see the Vermeers and the new American wing — I hope you’re having a joyful weekend!

Listen to the birds

Image by the always wonderful John&Fish

When my studiomate Hayyim brought copies of these incredible 18th century color charts to the studio yesterday, I couldn’t wait to find and share them. They come from a book (which is online in its entirety) on the development of color technologies in Europe in the 18th century. The charts show the emergence of the color wheels most artists and designers are familiar with, and some more novel approaches, such as triangles and pyramids, that reveal a generation of thinkers’ joyful struggle to make sense of our chromatic world in the wake of Newton’s theory of color.

I hope the color brightens up your weekend. See you next week!

xx Ingrid

Addendum: In the original post, I linked but did not cite the source of these wonderful charts. Please see the following reference for more information on this fascinating topic:

Sarah Lowengard, The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe, Gutenberg-e Series (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). www.gutenberg-e.org/lowengard

The lure of the new is a looming constant in industrialized society. Shiny and fresh, novelties constantly beckon: giant glossy plasma screens, sweet-smelling candles, cute kitchen utensils, sexy shoes, and the next must-have gadget of the moment.

Against this relentless parade of newer and better, it’s occasionally nice to take a moment to appreciate the objects and stories of old. Ancient Industries catalogs an array of traditional arts, crafts, and designs into the simple categories “living” and “extinct,” reminding us of treasures we’ve lost and ones that we should appreciate while they still linger.

Perusing the blog is like a joyful history lesson told through beautiful and beloved objects, like those above. Some have cultural meaning, others just have personal meaning for the writers. See more here.

Cluster ballooning is your inner child’s (or inner daredevil’s) fantasy come true. I thought this was something scenic done for effect in movies (see The Red Balloon) — I never imagined people did this in real life.

Oh, but they do, some flying up to 4 miles high (!) in what they call a “something between a sport and a personal eccentricity.” John Ninomiya, a cluster ballooner with over 60 flights under his belt gives a beautiful explication of the sport’s peculiar combination between delight and daring:

Cluster ballooning is also something very beautiful and whimsical – like something from a children’s story, or something from a dream. For me, the tension between those two elements – being carried away with these huge, colorful toys, and at the same time, exercising the appropriate skill not to end up in trouble with the FAA, or possibly injured or killed – that’s what I find so interesting about cluster ballooning.

Cluster ballooning aesthetically is the confluence of so many joyful elements, it’s hard to name them all: round, shiny balloons, gathered together in an abundant mass; the transcendent floating and rising movements that make us look above the horizon; the freedom of flight, unencumbered by heavy craft; the wonder of being above the clouds, leaving the earth and then returning to it; and the absurdity that all this is done by a toy, the very same thing used to decorate a mailbox on a child’s birthday.

It’s an extraordinary feeling when something you never thought existed is revealed to you. As I child, the tug of a helium balloon on my wrist filled me with a fantasy of being carried aloft that was part wish, part fear, but all joy.

Read more about cluster ballooning here, and if you’re feeling brave, check out a tutorial here.

Glow-in-the-dark mushrooms — another weird and wonderful innovation from Mother Nature. Seven new species of bioluminescent mushrooms were recently discovered by scientists in places as diverse as Japan, Belize, Brazil, and Jamaica.

{via Wired}

With its latest ads, Microsoft is hoping that some tooth-aching cuteness will make you forget all about the nightmare that was Vista. We might quibble with the logic, but the execution is hard to fault. Kylie’s cute, and I can’t help but giggle when that music comes on and the cat with the marshmallows flashes on the screen with the words, “snappy and responsive.”

A few weeks ago, Virginia tweeted me the question: “What is the relationship between cuteness and joy?” It’s a question I’ve been pondering for a while now. My theory on the subject is still evolving, but in short, it’s based on the fact that we have a visceral, positive reaction to children and childlike things, even those that are not related to us. This is adaptive, of course, because raising children requires sacrifices of a society, not just a parental unit, and so a natural affinity and protective instinct towards children protects the species as a whole. (Chowing down on a few of your neighbor’s hatchlings might be ok when you’re a crocodile with 70 eggs, but with us low-yield humans this kind of behavior is evolutionarily unwise, not to mention socially unpopular.) The assertion that we have an innate positive reaction to children is supported to some extent by research by Morton Kringelbach in his book The Pleasure Center, in which non-parent adults show greater activity in a region of the brain associated with emotion and reward when viewing infant faces than when viewing adult faces.

How does this translate to cuteness? Many cute things are defined by abstractions of neotenized (juvenilized) qualities: big eyes, round cheeks, proportionally large head, and prominent forehead. You would think abstractions would be less effective at evoking our emotions, but actually the reverse may be true, due to something psychologists call the peak-shift effect. Evidently the brain recognizes features made more salient through amplification and distortion even better than the real thing. This is why caricatures are so easy to recognize and so compelling. Cute things are like caricatures of children, distorted by the overemphasis of certain childlike proportions and features. Compare the big-headed Bratz dolls with Barbie, and the features of any stuffed animal with the real thing to see how this abstraction plays out. You can also see abstraction of childhood in cute movements, such as the wobbling of Weebles, which mimic an unsteady toddler. And perhaps we will also find the same to be true for sounds, as children’s voices are higher in pitch than adult voices, and have a less regular cadence.

Maybe Microsoft is hoping that by associating Windows 7 with all this cuteness, there will be a halo effect of protection and tenderness towards the operating system. I’m not sure but it could work, at least in the short term until the emotional impact of daily use takes prominence. Emotions are curiously non-directed, and though they are triggered by one object, the feelings are often transferred or ascribed to another. Microsoft is also shrewdly and not-so-subtly tapping into something else here, which is the cute photo and video forwarding meme (epitomized by sites like Cute Overload) which consumes significant bandwidth on most social media platforms. So it’s not just an innate emotional programing this type of ad appeals to, but also a cultural moment.

At the end of the ad, Microsoft promises “more happy” is to come. Very curious to see what that will look like, and whether Windows 7 actually incorporates any aesthetics of joy into the design of the software itself.

Oh, how I loved Gourmet. By far my favorite of the foodie mags, it’s always been a voice for the joy of food. Gourmet celebrated not just food’s flavor and aroma, but food as a visual art, food as a universal language, food as a carrier of cultural meaning and dialogue, food as biography of a food-lover’s life. It facilitated this passion for the short on time or skills to some degree, but never compromised the indulgent joy of a day arranged around cooking and eating by bludgeoning it with excessive pragmatism (ahem, Bon Appetit). I would have subscribed at three times the price to have kept it alive.

Aesthetics of joy are alive and well on this penultimate cover, so much so I’d already planned a post around it before this sad news arrived. Bright, vibrant color; the spherical apple; the shiny surface; the sticky sweetness you can practically taste just by looking at it — this is the joy of autumn made visible, and a clear illustration of what food culture is losing in Gourmet.

How fun are these? Landor Sydney’s invitations for AGDA fold up into paper planes!

It’s a great example of how design can create permission to play. The design is still a flat sheet of paper, but the little lines indicating the folds invite you to transform it into something else.

I’ve written about tilt-shift (where real-life scenes are photographed or photoshopped to look like tiny models) before, but I’ve never seen anything like this before: a stop-motion tilt-shift video of a day at Disney. The scale shift is so charming and really captures the magic!

{via @deepglamour}

Another great weekend. Yesterday I took a day trip with my mom to see Philip Johnson’s amazing Glass House, in New Canaan, CT, which sparked some new reflection on a topic I’ve been pondering for some time: is there a relationship between joy and modernism?

In theory, that relationship is antithetical. Modernism strives for ideological purity, while joy revels in the odd, absurd, silly, and cute. Joy is obviously emotional, whereas modern design is guided by rationality — by principles of formal organization, visual proportion, and spatial balance. Joy is ebullient, modernism is restrained. Joy is youthful and lighthearted; modernism is serious and mature. The advent of modernism was really like a repression of joy, which burst forth in a haze of silliness in the post-modern era.

Form and color choices reflect modernism’s sober attitude, with a devotion to angles over curves and a limited color palette. It was interesting to see this study of average color calculated from MoMA’s art collection, the result being #A79F94, a dull warm gray. The study’s creator calls it “the color of art,” but I wonder if it’s more accurately “the color of modernism” — austere and serene.

Of course, this is not to say there are no joyful modernists. I think if you had to pick one, Eva Zeisel would be the obvious choice, but the Eames and the Scandinavians also had a more emotional, energetic sensibility. The movement evolved over time and softened. Still, a certain detachment and reserve is inscribed in modernism, and too exuberant a notion of form would be incompatible with the doctrine.

Yet, I felt joy at the Glass House. Standing in that transparent box, immersed in the fantasy of a home without walls — it was an exultant feeling. Glass becomes wondrous in this context, creating a porous connection between home and environment that is profoundly emotional. From the outside, the home almost disappears, lost in the play of reflections across its surfaces. From the inside, it expands outward. With no walls, the space is voluminous, endless, growing. And this airy expansion is a definitive aesthetic of joy.

Most of the time, if modernism achieves an emotional quality, it’s neutral serenity. More often, it’s an emotionally-detached sense of awe and inspiration. But as my weekend experience showed me, there are exceptions. Perhaps in spite of all the efforts towards rational purity, the modernist spirit every now and then rises up and revels in the joy of light, space, and form.

I love the spontaneity and texture of these paintings layered over photographs by Gerhard Richter. I h0pe they brighten your Friday and that you have a lovely, joyful weekend!

Xx Ingrid

The other night I was at Green Depot for the Inhabitat NYC launch and I couldn’t resist the gorgeous wall of paint swatches. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m crazy about color and those walls of color chips have an almost hypnotic effect on me. I couldn’t resist taking a strip of bright yellow with me to think about what I’d paint with it. Well lo and behold the next day I’m on the subway and I reach for Alice in Wonderland (which I’m rereading for something like the 25th time) and the yellow strip has slipped itself into the pages just like a bookmark. Happy accident!

Ok, I know this isn’t even really a project, but you could make it one if you felt so inclined, by adding a ribbon or other decoration at the top, or pasting two back-to-back for a double-sided version. Either way, it’s nice joyful little thing you can make with very little effort at all, and for free, to boot.

Quick! Name the car you think of when I say “joy.”

…VW bug? …Mini Cooper? …BMW?

This new BMW “joy” positioning is being rolled out so softly it’s hard to tell where it’s going yet, but so far it feels like there’s a disconnect between the BMW people know and love and the BMW the brand is selling.

In “The Making of The Story of Joy” video, a behind-the-scenes look at the hero ad for the new campaign, an unidentified BMW rep is quoted as saying:

You buy goosebumps and you buy smiles and you buy adrenaline and you buy speed and you buy stories and experiences and emotion and it makes me smile even thinking about it. And that’s joy, and that’s what you get when you buy BMW, and it’s what the brand has always been about.

Really? Because I thought BMW was always about the cold metallic awesomeness of German engineering. For three decades, BMW called itself the “ultimate driving machine,” a positioning that reinforced ideas of performance, quality, speed, and luxury and kept the focus firmly on the vehicles. A quick browse of BMW’s brandtags is all that’s needed to confirm the clear understanding that rewarded such consistency of message across the company’s design and communications for all those years.

It’s unclear whether the change had an impetus or is just change for change’s sake, but evidently BMW’s brand managers felt they needed a more emotional positioning. They’ve encapsulated this idea in the new tagline “sheer driving pleasure,” which actually feels like a very appropriate evolution from “ultimate driving machine”: symmetrical to the original, with a more emotional and evocative tone that focuses on the response (pleasure) rather than the stimulus (machine).

All good so far. But from pleasure to joy is a much bigger leap, and a less credible one for this very masculine, mature brand. Pleasure is intense, sensuous, and thrilling; joy is childlike, whimsical, charming, cute, and sweet. Heart-racing pleasure makes perfect sense as emotional territory for BMW to own; the sweetness of joy feels like a force-fit.

Which is how it seems in these ads. In the “Story of Joy” ad (still Europe-only, for the moment), the voiceover describes joy as “efficient, dynamic, and unstoppable,” which makes the brand feel about as emotionally arousing as a FedEx truck. In an effort to inspire passion, the ad shows a BMW festival, a little boy surrounded by toy cars in his bedroom, and a bunch of drivers happily “joy-riding”. It does make you smile. But none of it has the humor of most VW ads, the odd charm of the old Sheet Metal Saturn ad, or the irreverent emotional punch of Mercedes nostalgia ads (like this one). BMW gets closer to joy’s quirky sensibility with the just-released “Jump for Joy” ad; but unfortunately this flies the furthest off the mark from the sleekness, aspiration, and power the brand is known for.

There’s no question that BMW is brand with enormous equity. They were probably right to pursue a more emotional tone in their marketing, but at this early stage it’s just not clear they hit upon the right emotion. In pursuit of joy, are they trading something more valuable?

The debut collection from the ladylike designers at Harvey Faircloth has a real joyful charm to it. It goes to show how you a few bright pops of color can bring a sense of cheekiness to an otherwise restrained look.

I also love when designers share their inspirations. Drawing from sources as varied as the Lascaux cave paintings and Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch, this clickable matrix really gives depth and story to the clothing.

Shop it here.