aesthetics of joy

Weirdest thing.

The other day when my laundry came back, I opened the bag and started to put away my clothes, and there in amongst the hand towels I discovered this little guy. A hitchhiker! He was just sitting there, hanging out, as if it made all the sense in the world that he should be there. To be honest, it was kind of creepy at first. An unexplained intrusion into my mundane evening, with vaguely magical undertones.

I had to figure out how he got there. I wondered if maybe he was a gift from the laundromat, a holiday thank you for my business. But when I called to ask, the woman had no idea what I was talking about. (Not a normal query, granted: “An elf. In my laundry. Did you put it there?”) As far as I could tell, she thought I had received someone else’s garment by accident and she asked me to return it next time.

So he must have arrived by accident. I looked it him more closely. Cute gnome. He’s made out of beautiful felt and pipecleaners and wool yarn. He doesn’t look like he’s been through the laundry — so it’s not one of those situations where he got stuck in the lint filter like a sock and emerged in the next load. It’s a mystery.

What’s wonderful — and for me, joyful — about this kind of mystery is that while I know there’s a rational explanation for the gnome’s appearance, it’s hidden from me. The gnome is felt and yarn and wire — it’s made of matter and must obey the laws of physics. Wherever it came from, it had to take a tangible path to get here. Perhaps it fell out of a crafter’s purse or pocket while she was shifting her sheets from washer to dryer, adhered to the laundress’s sleeve by static cling, and made its way into my bag. But I don’t know that story — no one does — and for me the gnome’s past is a giant ellipsis. This would be a nonstarter if the item were a sock or a teddy bear. But it’s an object that takes a form with a built-in magical narrative. Gnomes, elves, fairies are the stuff of myth and lore. If anything has a plausible reason for mysterious behavior, the gnome is it. The gnome roams, as we learn in Amelie and those Travelocity commercials — it appears in places, without taking a journey to get there. Just like my gnome. In a way, it’s a silly and trivial happening. But I wanted to share it because I think it provides an interesting example of the alignment between magical narratives and magical aesthetics.

For the meantime, I’ve decided to keep him. When I was working at Landor in Sydney, my coworkers and I used to joke when we were overwhelmed that we needed a magic gnome to handle the extra work. Well, right now I have ten days until I present my research on Aesthetics of Joy for the first time, and there are lots of loose ends to tie up. I could use a magic gnome. As my mom says, sometimes things find us. And right now, my gnome just makes me feel like the mysteries of the universe are working in my favor!

*** Please bear with me if posts are sparse over the next two weeks as I complete this last leg of my masters. I will be back in force come December 14th, with lots of photos of my latest joy-inspired furniture pieces and many thoughts I’ve been saving up to post. Thanks for reading!

xx Ingrid

Wonderful project by Rachel Berger. Every day for 100 days she chose a color swatch at random from a bag, and wrote a short piece (like a prose haiku) inspired by it. I love how it exposes all the random connections that color and language form in our tangled brains. There are the aesthetics of joy in the world, but then there are also the aesthetics of joy inside us — embedded in the network in our neurons, the experiences of our cells, the sensations still living on our fingertips, and the pattern of thrills that has shaken our bones. Sometimes it can be hard to access them, but then a chance encounter with a color, aroma, or evocative sound can bring them right back to the surface of the now.

{via DesignObserver}

I’m taking a holiday from the blog this long weekend to focus on last-minute details for the thesis. Happy Thanksgiving, and see you Monday!

xx Ingrid

Yesterday “Stripes!” and today “Fela!”  This might be the week of exclamation point titles. They’re the most joyful punctuation, and with all the work and so little sleep, I’m getting a little punchy. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll write about those bushmen whose name has the ! at the beginning, the !Kung, and then finish the week out with some Lichtenstein paintings!

Please, don’t mind me. Sleep deprivation makes me giddy. (!)

But back to the order of the day, which is a short note about Fela! the musical, a biopic about the legendary founder of the Afrobeat genre of music Fela Kuti, which has just moved to the Eugene O’Neill from Off-Broadway. My friend Maggie scored free tickets to the Saturday night preview show and I just could not stay at home with the laptop with that on offer. It would not have been the joyful thing to do.

I arrived flustered and let’s just be honest, more than a little cranky. I left light as a feather. What happened in between? Music, of course — Fela’s soul-stirring, body-shaking sounds, brought to life by Antibalas, a Brooklyn Afrobeat band, charismatic lead Sahr Ngaujah and the sensational Lillias White. Dancing — not just by men who seem born in motion and women whose bodies seem to be all hips and no spine, but by you too, every last gangly uncoordinated one of you. And the color and energy of costumes that are positively kinetic in their vibrancy.

I couldn’t help but dig up a little history. This video shows Fela in concert — his songs were known to run 20 minutes or longer — so you can get a feel for the music and the joyous performance style if you aren’t familiar with it.

On the revolutionary music blog Revolucion, No you can find lots more about Kuti’s music, as well as these great images of his “queens,” the women who were his dancers and also his wives. These really give you a sense of the gorgeous energy that inspired Marina Draghici’s wonderful costumes and sets.

The translation from history to real life is so vivid, so immersive, that you can’t help but feel that you’re in a completely different world for a few hours. You’re certainly a long way from Broadway!

Read the NYT review: Making Music Mightier Than the Sword
See images of the sets and costumes from the show
Get tickets here

I love how the stripes feel like they’re coming to life in these colorful tape installations by artist Rebecca Ward.

{via @design_sponge}

Remember these? I found one lying (improperly) discarded on a subway platform back in September and labeled it “joyful litter.” Now, the NYT explains: it’s a public art project by artist Reed Seifer.

Read more, here.

{via @swissmiss}

I’ve been saving up these color wheels for just such a gray fall day as this one. I present my thesis just 3 weeks from tomorrow, and while daylight is short the workdays are definitely getting long. Of course, it does help that the work I’m doing is so upbeat and colorful. Just looking at happy images has powerful unconscious effects on mood, creativity, and energy. These color wheels are like a shot of caffeine to the arm — the perfect late-mid-week boost!

Above, {via}

These thread and quilt color wheels are by my favorite fabric-and-yarn store combo, Purl. They sell fabric bundles to help you recreate the quilt above.

Above, lilfishstudios

Above, Andy Gilmore, who I first wrote about here.

Don’t have a source on the two above — apologies. If this is you, let me know.

And finally, the toy I’d most like to see under the tree if I were four years old (and if Pottery Barn hadn’t discontinued it):

Monday night on the Daily Show, Jon Stewart took the National Toy Hall of Fame to task for waiting so long to induct the ball into its hallowed ranks. In this segment, he rails against the institution for selecting “stick” and “cardboard box” years before the ancient and essential “ball.”

I like that the National Toy Hall of Fame is celebrating simple playthings, not just the latest craze coming out of Mattel and Hasbro’s factories. The truth is that the most stimulating toys are the most open-ended, a point I raised a few months ago in a post on aesthetics of play, and the ball is the most infinitely malleable toy out there. Having a ball means having a game, whether you’re bouncing it against a wall or playing with dozens of others on teams. Surely everyone has a childhood memory of a game they played with a ball where the rules were some imaginative variation on an existing game. My best friend Annie and I invented “pancake-turner ball,” which was a cross between keep-up and tennis played with two spatulas and an over-sized tennis ball.

Like Stewart, it strikes me as ridiculous that it could take so long (11 years!) to get ball into the Toy Hall of Fame. So, congrats Ball, on your long-overdue honor!

If I had a set of these cheerful chopsticks from DWR Tools For Living, my takeout bill would be steep! Though I guess I could offset the cost with noodle dinners, as these would make even dollar-store ramen into a joyful experience.

Mark your calendar or set your DVR for January 4th, which is the premiere of an interesting new series from PBS called This Emotional Life. Happiness will be a significant focus of the series, and the interviewees are a fascinating and diverse group: Katie Couric, Richard Gere, Larry David, Chevy Chase, and a slew of scientists and everyday people. The series is hosted by Dan Gilbert, a Harvard psychology professor and author of the excellent book Stumbling on Happiness.

I’m not sure there will be much perspective on the relevance of design to our emotional lives, but there rarely is in these sorts of discussions. They usually focus on a person’s relationship with the self or with others, and almost never focus on the relationships between people, spaces, and things, unless those relationships are negative: materialism, shopaholism, hoarding…. (Of course, I don’t think the focus on people is wrong — things are no substitute for people in the joy equation, and money can’t buy happiness. I only point out that the connection between objects and emotions in a positive way is rarely a focus in the pop science arena.)

But I’ll be watching because I think the topics covered will provide copious opportunities for thinking about emotion and design. Jessica Zucker’s info-packed post on skin and the sense of touch on the series’s website is  a great example of the kind of thinking that gets my mind buzzing with ideas for how to design in a more emotionally positive way.

Watch the trailer here.

I can’t believe I missed these at Halloween. Street artist Diabetik was placing these traffic cones on streets around the DC area.

Here is a great example of something that walks the line between joy and joke, and I think comes out on the side of joy. This is something design wrestles with a lot. A joke is something whose pleasure declines over time, usually sharply. I’m thinking of all those cutensils, the little kitchen cartoons that hang from your faucet or the side of your teacup and were amusing the first time you saw them and now are just kind of annoying. They’re one-liners, and once you’ve gotten the punchline, they become ponderous.

Joy, on the other hand, is something you feel over and over again. It doesn’t get old — often it gets better with time. Joy is carried by aesthetics; it stimulates the senses, not just the funny bone. So even if there is a punchline, as in this case when you make the connection between cone and candy, or the wordplay on cone and corn, there’s a deeper level of sensory pleasure that comes from the aesthetics. If these cones were painted red, orange and turquoise, the joke wouldn’t be there, but you’d still feel a sense of delight at the unexpected hit of color and stripes.

Jokes and joy often come together, and because of this many designers confuse the two. Many designers see humor as a route to joy, but they don’t realize that to embody a joke in material without a reinforcing aesthetic experience is irresponsible. A joke that falls flat on stage harms no one. But a joke injection-molded in plastic, manufactured by underpaid workers in poor conditions, shipped to people all over the world, and discarded the next week or month or year is flat-out criminal. If you want to design jokes, go ahead — but don’t mass-produce them. Make a prototype or a computer model and send it around the web. Show it on YouTube and share it via Twitter. But if you want to design things for people, then make them joyful, or contenting, or stimulating, or awe-inspiring. Make things whose aesthetic properties support the emotional quality you want to evoke, through color, texture, form, density, sound, smell, movement. Before you expend precious matter and energy in the expression of an idea, ask yourself, will it still tickle you ten years from now?

If not, spare a thought about the costs of making it. And think about ways you might design it to be more emotionally durable. Aesthetics of joy is often just about the simple pleasure of these wonderful, renewable experiences. On the blog I like to highlight beautiful, joyful things and talk about why they are so. But at the heart of it all is the idea that through more conscious attention to aesthetics we can move away from one-liners towards these more lasting experiences, away from emotional disposability towards emotional sustainability.