I’m spending quite a bit of time lately contemplating the emotional lives of cities. Between my talk at makeCalgary on designing joyful cities and a related installment in the works for my Core77 column, the topic of how our urban environments make us feel is top of mind at the moment. But it’s rare to see the city reflect our own emotion back at us. This project, Emotional Cities, is a novel exception, using light installations to project the collective emotional state of the city. City dwellers can input their mood on a web site via a simple color-coded schema. The original installation was in Stockholm (above) and a subsequent version was temporarily installed on the Palace Albania in Belgrade.

The project blog is unfortunately a bit dated, so it’s unclear whether it’s still going, but it’s a beautiful experiment nonetheless. I wonder what the effects are of knowing what everyone else in your city is feeling. If it’s a purple day (the lowest of the doldrums, on the Emotional Cities scale), do you feel dragged down? If it’s a red day (the happiest), do you feel a boost?

I can imagine we’ll see more of these types of projects in the near future, as the technology to create light installations is becoming more accessible and platforms like Twitter and Facebook are offering a robust and constantly updated data set on emotion and mood. It would be fun to see more buildings that become, as Emotional Cities says, like thermometers for the feelings of a city.

Tonight I had the privilege of speaking at makeCalgary, a conference that looks to design for inspiration on instigating catalytic change in cities. The theme is “provoking Calgary’s next chapter,” and to that end I’ll be sharing some design principles for joyful cities, using examples from New York (which has been experiencing its own waves of inspiring change lately). I was incredibly impressed with the level of dialogue and especially the sensitivity to emotion among the crowd. Calgary is clearly primed for joyful change.

One fascinating discussion emerged around the idea of winter. A commenter observed that very few images in the presentations showed winter, of which Calgary has a hefty one. How do we create joy when the landscape forces us indoors, or at least makes it less natural to want to be outside? A fellow speaker, Rob Adams, head of urban design for the city of Melbourne offered a nice piece of advice from the Danes: “There is no bad weather. Only bad clothing.” I love this because it underscores that joy so often lives outside of the comfort zone. In North America we overwhelmingly design for comfort. But comfort is often inimical to joy because it is so cozy we become complacent and insular, rather than openminded, exploratory, and social. Better to take the advice of a commenter from Winnipeg who noted that residents of that city often skate to work on their river once it has frozen over!

Tomorrow, I’ll be helping to lead a charrette to apply some of the diverse inspirations from different cities to a site within Calgary. Looking forward to sharing back after the conference.

If you’re curious to hear more about what I’ll be sharing, here’s a link to a podcast interview I did with two of the conference’s organizers, Matt Knapik and Kate van Fraassen. Fun!

A few months ago I wrote about the Hypothetical Development Project, a collaboration between Rob Walker, Ellen Susan, and G. K. Darby to create “imagined futures” of abandoned buildings, expressed through mock architectural renderings. Over on Places, Rob Walker now has a great piece relating the story of the project, as well as its role in the context of architectural fiction. (The piece also quotes some thoughts from the original Aesthetics of Joy writeup.)

On the surface, design fiction is an odd concept. Design is a functional discipline, a craft driven to make ideas tangible, to concretize solutions into usable forms. Design operates on the principle that by distilling imagination into form, it becomes truth. People can dislike a thing, dispute its purpose, disagree with its intentions – but they cannot deny it exists.

On the other hand, fiction is a lie. A welcome and seductive lie, perhaps, but still a non-truth. And the subject of a lie does not exist beyond the world of its own narrative. So within “design fiction” there is a tension – between tangible and ephemeral, existence and non-existence, imagination and reality. Walker rightly points out that many of the architectural renderings we see are just this kind of designed fabrication. (Many are created as marketing gestures, but the projects they show are never funded and therefore never built.) In this sense, they are less lies, and more, as I noted in my original assessment, manifestations of hope and desire. Unable to predict THE future, they instead try to depict A future, a kind of illuminating untruth. What is illuminated? As Walker points out, both something in the abandoned structure, the forlorn substrate of the fiction, and in the viewer themselves.

The moment that interests me most, I suppose, would be the random passerby who suddenly notices that building he or she has walked past a hundred times, just because there’s this sign on it, this arrestingly uncanny sign that tells a story that’s blatantly and intentionally absurd. I think that moment — the story, in one image, of an implausible future for an unpopular place — makes the building exist again in a new way. It changes nothing into something.

I think it makes the passerby exist in a new way, too.

The role of designer as storyteller is not a new construct in the design world, but I think this project gives it new resonance, or at least reminds us that the value of conceptual design (even absurdist conceptual design with no hope of being made real) need not be subordinate to the design of the functional here-and-now. Design fiction gives us places to go. It highlights features and flaws. It expresses wishes in a voice much nicer than a whine. In some ways, it is a necessary precursor to “real” design, if we want that design to represent progress, and not just continuation.

I say all of this as a former fiction writer, one with great respect for the simple joy of a story told for its own sake. While as a designer I am tempted to look for a practical application for Hypothetical Development, as a writer I’m happy for it just to just contribute to the general joy of our surroundings. As Walker writes, “…I don’t think a story needs to be considered a means to an end. A story is an end. And a sign on an abandoned building is as good a medium as I can think of for telling an entertaining tale.” The beauty of design fiction is the way it fuses the storyteller’s art with the evocative palette of the form-crafter. It’s a rich space, and if I take anything away from the project, it’s that many, many entertaining (and inspiring) tales are waiting to be told.

Places: Implausible Futures for Unpopular Places

For about thirty seconds after coming across this piece, “Housing Boom, if You’re a Bird,” in the NYT, I was enchanted. I read:

Awhile back, the website Science and Religion Today asked me to write a short piece on the topic of aesthetics of places of worship, and I thought about some of the ideas in that piece when I saw these amazing images of vaulted ceilings from the book Heavenly Vaults, by David Stephenson. I realized I never posted the piece in full here, so I thought I share these ideas from the archives:

People seek many different things in a spiritual experience, a fact attested to by the variety of religions and rituals practiced around the world today. But if there’s one motivation that all faiths seem to share, it’s a desire for transcendence — a wish to rise above mundane concerns and commune with a higher or more complete entity. When we worship, we look to shift our perspective away from the trivial towards the big picture, to put ourselves in context of a larger whole. Can design help us do this?

In short, yes. Design won’t make believers out of atheists, but it can certainly provide conditions for deepening the experience for the spiritually inclined. Researchers studying awe, an emotional state closely linked to transcendence, believe that a key trigger is a sense of vastness. Encountering objects or spaces that are extremely large in scale, from Ayer’s Rock to the Grand Canyon, stimulates what psychologists call a need for accommodation — a need to take this new experience and fit it into our existing mental models, stretching them in the process. As our mental models struggle to accommodate the power behind works of great scale (both natural and manmade), we feel smaller by comparison. Our focus broadens, which effectively minimizes our daily preoccupations. The builders of the great cathedrals, the Angkor temples in Cambodia, and Easter Island’s famous moai statues all understood, whether explicitly or intuitively, the power of great scale to inspire this perspective-shifting, spiritual sense of awe.

Scale can be particularly effective when the exaggerated dimension is height. Earthly existence naturally has a vertical orientation, defined by the gravitational force that holds us to the earth. Upward directionality is associated with lightness, air, and spiritual thoughts, while downward brings connotations of heaviness, earth, and physicality. Some religions conceptualize this vertical dichotomy as a moral one, with heaven above earth and hell below it. And many religions conceive of the spirit as a weightless entity, which is freed upon death from its gravity-bound body. Defying this downward pressure by turning our gaze upwards naturally leads many of us to a more spiritual frame of mind. Structures that are upwardly expansive feel more conducive to worship than those with low, dark ceilings. This effect can be enhanced by adorning the ceiling with elements that cause the gaze to drift upward, such as lighting fixtures, ceiling frescos, or skylights.

Turning the gaze upwards has another effect: it allows more light into the eye, and light is another aesthetic element that can enhance our spiritual experience. Light is a common metaphor for deities and a proxy for their blessing. In Genesis, God’s first act after creating heaven and earth is to proclaim “Let there be light.” When a religion wins a convert, they say he has “seen the light,” and the object of spiritual quests is “enlightenment.” Many early religions, such as those of ancient Egypt and Greece, featured gods of light or sun as primary deities. It makes sense that light would be so prominent a feature in worship, considering its significance to our survival. Light was certainly on the minds of gothic cathedral builders when they developed the practice of using flying buttresses. By taking pressure off of the walls, these exterior structures allowed for taller, lighter cathedrals with vast expanses of glass windows that were previously impossible. Structures of worship are at their most sublime not just when they’re bright, but when they call attention to the light and focus our gaze on it. Stained glass windows are one way architects of religious structures have done this. Others work with natural light. A particularly beautiful example is Osaka’s Church of Light, designed by Tadao Ando. The cuts in the expansive structure shape the light, giving it form and presence. The result is an expansive space with a transcendent glow.

Surely there are other aesthetics more specific to different religions that can enhance the experience of prayer and spiritual contemplation. Features such as the structure’s shape, color treatments, and level of adornment all vary according to belief systems. But these three elements — scale, height, and light — seem to have deep roots in human nature or cultural practice that make them particularly conducive to achieving spiritual communion. Can you pray meaningfully in a dimly lit, undergound cave? Surely the answer is yes. But an expansive, well-lit space is more likely to put you in a prayerful mood.

Images: DesignBoom
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A wonderful find, from my dear friend Mara of Neither Snow, is this “rainbow warrior.” The warrior is a street artist working in Albuquerque, using spilled paint to pour rainbows off the tops of buildings. He (or she)’s really got some people riled up (see newscast, here) and it strikes me as remarkable that people can be so dour in the face of rainbows.

The charm of the story is in how the community has rallied to the warrior’s defense. This Facebook page has drawn 1,492 fans “in support of the Rainbow Warrior, whomever s/he may be.” And the soul of the story is in the warrior’s own words. This is the warrior on his/her inspiration for painting the rainbows:

About three or four years ago … I was feeling really depressed and I had this notion that if I went out and painted a rainbow, maybe someone would see it and feel what I was feeling or feel anything as intensely as I was. The first one I did, I just literally dumped the paint over the side of a pretty ugly, abandoned, alleyway building.

And this is the warrior on street art:

I want to inspire other people. That’s part of all my art; it’s always positive. I think I chose street art to inspire somebody else in a way that’s outside of the box. Like somebody who wouldn’t normally be exposed to street art, somebody who would just walk past it. Street art really saves a lot of people who are down in their lives and on their luck. This is their one and only outlet. Plus, you get an immediate response from people. A lot of times it’s just, Look at that graffiti on that freeway wall. But maybe the graffiti on the freeway isn’t the ugly thing, maybe that’s not what they’re angry about. Maybe they’re angry about how for the last 10 years you’ve been driving through this prison freeway with these big ugly gray walls and it just took the graffiti to point out the ugly that was already there.

I find this tension – between the forbidden act of graffiti, technically vandalism, and the delight people are discovering as a consequence – acutely compelling. Is an illegal rainbow still joyful? Here’s a letter writer commenting on the rainbow warrior situation:

So, somebody lays down a rainbow on the thing, a piece of art (and yes, it is art, even if it is “free,” and maybe especially so) that pokes fun at the mess, that makes me grin and say, “That’s a little better!” As a life-long citizen of Albuquerque, as someone who has had his very personal property damaged by genuinely malicious individuals: this isn’t the same thing. Is it graffiti? Yeah. Is it the same as somebody tagging a vulgar word on the car my parents gave me when I went to college? No. The intention of the rainbows is perhaps mischievous, but it is definitely not malicious. The intention, and the execution, is a wink, a laugh, a little unexpected burst. Worth a slap on the wrist and a good talking to, nothing more.

(Ok, and now I’m going to pause, because the 400 words and 45 minutes I just spent finishing this post have vanished into the ether that is this charming second day of the new year. [Deep breath and a moment to convince myself it will come out better the second time around.] Ok…)

I like this distinction between mischief and malice. The mess the writer refers to is the Anasazi building, the most public of the warrior’s targets, a high-rise which had recently been taken over by the Albuquerque government because the developer was charged with fraud, (a crime with no discernible aesthetic value). I like the idea that the rainbow has in a way recast an unfortunate incident for the citizens of the city. Redemption, via transgression.

How important is this element of transgression in the joy we feel from street art? Is there something inherent in the violation of boundaries that fuels our pleasure when we look at it? The carefree disregard of the strictures of private ownership and the numbing conventions of urban aesthetic culture? Maybe our delight is less about the vibrancy of the color, and more about the irrepressible spirit that put it there.

I’ve been wondering this in the wake of a visit last week to Wynwood Walls, a collection of murals in an artfully dingy Miami neighborhood. Wynwood brings together works by a range of street artists, well-known names like Futura, Shepherd Fairey, Nunca, Space Invader, etc. under the sanction of gallerists and developers, in a project that dropped out of Art Basel 2009. I really like a number of these works (particularly the piece by Nunca, below), and I recognize that the mainstreaming of street art gives these artists a chance to make a real living, but I can’t help but wonder: Is some of the joy lost by bringing these works into this kind of walled garden? Tamed by the light of legality and legitimacy, are they just a bit less vibrant, a bit more inert?

Maybe my previous question – Can an illegal rainbow be joyful? – had it backwards. Maybe it’s precisely the illegality that touches us. Mischief, with its attendant unpredictability and freedom, makes us feel vicariously free.

Thoughts?

By the way, if you find yourself in Miami, definitely make your way over to Wynwood and see it for yourself. Have lunch at the Wynwood Kitchen and Bar and wander the zillions of galleries which seem to have sprung up, perfectly distressed-looking, practically yesterday. It’s a nice day out, and a welcome departure from the excess of the design district.

Rainbow Warrior images via Patricia Austhoff and The Fibe Squad. And again, thanks, Mara.

How many times have you walked past an old abandoned building and thought: that would be a great place for a bar/library/gallery/fill-in-the-blank? On runs through Red Hook and along the Gowanus Canal, I often find myself struck by certain wabi sabi looking warehouses and industrial buildings and thinking about the wonderful kinds of “third places” that could inhabit them. Abandoned buildings are evocative substrates for this kind of architectural daydreaming — like discarded hermit crab shells, they have both history and possibility.

I love the way this idea, The Hypothetical Development Project, takes those germs of imagined futures and makes them visible. The project, a public art collaboration between Rob Walker, Ellen Susan, and G.K. Darby, creates renderings of ideas for uses of abandoned buildings in New Orleans, which will be posted at the sites like developers’ renderings. In this case, though, the envisioned uses are a bit left of center. A Museum of the Self, with an enormous Facebook-style thumbs up is one; a Loitering Centre is another. Juxtaposed against the forlorn emptiness of abandoned structures, these silly fantasies feel delightful — they are uninhibited manifestations of creative energy, filtered through a lens of hope.

That they are implausible is their charm, but I half-h0pe that one of them will be compelling enough to stick. The trio is raising funds via Kickstarter (they’re very close to their goal, and just need a little help getting over the line!), and I imagine a sequel where popular passion for one of the Hypothetical Development ideas becomes the seed for a real, crowdsourced development project. I feel like we need more unconventional spaces for people to convene in our urban environments, and it’s exciting to think about how fiction can find new possibilities in old structures. In effect, these renderings are like playful narrative prototypes, highlighting new ways and places to gather in the years to come.

The Hypothetical Development Project home page
Hypothetical Development Kickstarter campaign

Well, I’m back after a longish, unscheduled break. Let’s call it a summer (working) holiday. But wow, did I miss it. I don’t plan on taking this much time away from the blog again for a long time. There are just too many interesting and joyful things to write about…

Before I launch into some thoughts on the things I’ve been reading and observing in the last few weeks, I want to just say a quick thank you to everyone who has commented, sent me an email, or sent me links recently. This summer has left me breathless, and I haven’t had a chance to respond to everyone yet, but rest assured that I will, and that I appreciate the kind words, the thoughtful recommendations, and the healthy debate you bring to my inbox. Thanks!

On my mind today are the aesthetics of nature. A big part of my thesis for Aesthetics of Joy is that joy evolved to guide us unconsciously towards things that would have been beneficial for our survival (or more accurately, the survival of our genetic material). It stands to reason that since during the bulk of this evolution humans were nomadic creatures living in an environment with far more trees than skyscrapers, natural environments are going to be replete with stimuli that make us feel joyful. Bright sunlight, ripe fruits, wide open spaces—these primal joys hold clues that give context and meaning to many of the things that delight us in the modern world. And as the research supporting evolutionary theories of psychology continues to accumulate, the evidence suggesting the connection between aesthetics of nature and our wellbeing is beginning to mount.

On his Frontal Cortex blog, now on Wired.com, Jonah Lehrer has a great discussion of some findings from the emerging field of ecopsychology, which looks at the relationship between nature and the mind. (I first wrote about this field of research in February, here.) One study, dating back to the mid-1990s, looked at female housing project residents, some of whom were living in apartments facing city streets and basketball courts, and others who had views of a grassy, landscaped courtyard. The women were tested on everything from attention to their ability to cope with life’s challenges, and those with the more natural view tested better on nearly every measure. Similarly, in a 2008 study led by Marc Berman at the University of Michigan, students who were given time to walk through a park before taking a series of tests performed better on measures of attention and memory than those who had walked through city streets.

According to psychologists, views of nature are restorative. They seem to allow the brain to reset and concentrate again. This reminds me of an insight noted by Chip and Dan Heath in their book Switch: Willpower, they observe, is finite. When you expend a lot of effort trying to control cravings, desires, or emotions in a certain situation, it can be draining, leaving you with little energy to control yourself in others. I wonder if there’s a similar mechanism going on here. Functioning in urban environments takes a lot of mental energy. It requires high alertness, and it’s sensorially complex; there’s a lot to process. I wonder if views of nature provide a reset because they are simply easier on our brains, evolved as they are for processing the stimuli in this environment.

This may be, but it’s not the whole story. Another study, also cited in the article on solastalgia I quoted in my February post, adds another piece to the puzzle. The study, conducted by Peter Kahn, took participants and stressed them out with a series of math tests, and then gave them one of three views to look at: a window facing out onto a tree-filled view, a plasma screen of the same view, and a blank wall. Those looking at the natural scene had the quickest stress reduction (measured by a decrease in heart rate). Those looking at the blank wall had a much slower return to normal heart rate. We could’ve predicted that. Subjects who looked at the nature scene and the plasma screen both looked at their views longer than those looking at the blank wall. Also a no-brainer. But surprisingly, the subjects who looked at the plasma screen showed virtually the same stress-reduction pattern as those looking at the wall. So while we’re drawn towards a views of nature to relieve our stress, it has to be real nature. It’s not something we can trace to one aesthetic element—like the color green or the contours of the leaves—and bottle it. It’s the full multisensory, immersive aesthetics of nature, all together, that foster wellbeing and joy.

Apparently, the kind of nature matters too. Lehrer’s post mentions another study that demonstrated that people who spend time in parks with a greater diversity of plant life score better on tests of psychological wellbeing than those who spend time in less biodiverse parks. A patch of grass may be green, but it’s not nature. A diverse park is more like nature, naturally, and probably a lot more like the environments in which our brains grew up. Variety, as much as greenness or leafiness, is an aesthetic of nature, and it seems it does us a lot of good.

Another fascinating insight about our brain and nature comes from an interview with Mark Changizi, an evolutionary neurobiologist whose latest book explores new research on human vision, on the Neuronarrative blog. Changizi observes that one of the reasons its so easy for humans to read (those of us who are literate read thousands of words in a day) is that our letterforms mimic natural shapes. He suggests that if our words looked like barcodes or fractal patterns, we would not be able to process them nearly as quickly. He says:

To be easy on the eye, writing needs to “look like nature,” just what our illiterate visual systems are fantastically competent at processing. The trick of that research direction was making this “writing looks like nature” idea rigorous, and coming up with ways of testing it. I show that there are certain signature visual patterns found in nearly any natural environment with opaque objects strewn about, and that these signature patterns are found in human writing. In short, writing has evolved so that written words look like visual objects.

I have to pause to marvel at the beauty of this insight, which is nothing short of thrilling for readers, writers, and typographers all. But as the awe subsides, I wonder if this fascinating insight holds a clue to applying aesthetics of nature to design in ways that really do foster our wellbeing. I’m sick of seeing wallpaper that looks like birch trees or tables with grass growing in the middle put forth as design’s  solution to the urban condition. Can’t we do better? As the plasma screen experiment demonstrated, a picture of nature isn’t going to cut it, and while it’s certainly a fine idea to have some plants around, I think we could go about “bringing the outside in” in a more sophisticated way. Perhaps there are visual patterns or spatial arrangements that better mimic a natural environment, design ideas that can be applied to urban planning, architecture, interiors, and products to provide some of the same benefits. It’s encouraging to think that we may be on the cusp of learnings that will help us bring more aesthetics of nature into our citified lives.

Of course, there’s another implication here, not for the design of a home necessarily, but maybe for the design of a lifestyle. Get outdoors. Do it often and especially when you’re stressed. Because no matter how well we’re eventually able to design to mimic nature, there’s no substitute for the real thing.

A few months ago I wrote about the architecture of worship — about how elements like elevation, light, and scale create a sense of awe that supports transcendent, spiritual joy. These elements are common to holy places: churches, temples, and mosques, as well as many spiritually significant natural spaces.

This morning, as I was reading The Architecture of Happiness (this is inspiring a lot of thinking at the moment), I came across a discussion of another aesthetic element that might stimulate that wonderful perspective shift we associate with religious joy: pattern at scale. Alain de Botton writes:

Muslim artisans covered the walls of houses and mosques with repeating sequences of delicate and complicated geometries, through which the infinite wisdom of God might be intimated. This ornamentation, so pleasingly intricate on a rug or a cup, was nothing less than hallucinatory when applied to an entire hall. Eyes accustomed to seeing only the practical and humdrum objects of daily life could, inside such a room, survey a world shorn of all associations with the everyday. They would sense a symmetry, without quite being able to grasp its underlying logic. Such works were like the products of a mind with none of our human limitations, of a higher power untainted by human coarseness and therefore worthy of unconditional reverence.

In prior posts, I’ve talked about pattern’s ability to create a sense of abundance, through a visual illusion that uses surface to mimic volume and quantity. This matters because we are innately drawn to abundance, and the aesthetic abundance of patterns such as dots and stripes seems to satisfy a vestigial hunger in our primal mind. Trained to the cycles of glut and privation, we crave quantity as a bulwark against an uncertain future.

But what about the type of pattern that de Botton is talking about — pattern so vast and so staggering, it creates an abundance almost incomprehensible to the human mind? At these orders of magnitude, dazzled by a supernatural abundance, our minds struggle to reconcile the scale of what we’re witnessing with the boundaries of our experience. We measure this new experience against the possible, the normal, and the likely; in each case, our existing mental models are challenged and stretched, causing us to wonder about how this experience came to be. We also face this conflict, between a new experience and our mental models, at encounters with great scale (Grand Canyon), great force (a thunderstorm), great talent (a passionate aria), or great good fortune (“miracles”). For the spiritually inclined, religious belief becomes a way to accommodate an amazing new experience, to explain it and the feeling it triggers within us. For non-believers, though the explanation may be different, the aesthetic awe and resulting joy is there too. It is joy at its mysterious best.

There is also, as de Botton observes, a transporting effect played by pattern at scale. The patterns that line the insides of mosques, like the colored light from stained glass windows, create a world apart. They are immersive and enveloping, jolting the mind away from mundane concerns and holding them at attention. In this way, they function not just as context for worship but a tool of it. Like a zen Buddhist koan, the endlessness of pattern dazzles and contains our restless minds, leaving them primed and open for transcendence.

Rob Walker (of Consumed) had an interesting post on his blog recently evolving the discussion around my Psychology Today post about Unhappy Hipsters and the emotional tenor of modern design. He picks up on my assertion that delight is at root an emotion connected with abundance. In my post, I wrote:

I think that modernism’s restrained quality is fundamentally in tension with the idea of delight. Delight is an emotion of abundance — a celebration of sensation and richness. Delight and joy are primally connected to wellness, and wellness in nature is lush, plump, vibrant, and bountiful.

Walker observes that there’s often something enchanting about abundance in the context of interior design, such as in many of the homes featured in “Sneak Peeks” on the blog Design*Sponge. (The photo above is from a similar type of series: The Selby‘s photos of the homes of creative people. This one is from the home of Sydney gallerist Sarah Cottier, photographer Ashley Barber, and their daughter Ruby.) We value a little abundance in the form of creative clutter because it makes a space invitingly human; collections of real things arranged at non-90 degree angles tell us we’re in a home, rather than a sanitized photo studio or furniture showroom. At the same time, Walker voices a healthy skepticism about the joys of abundance:

I am somewhat cautious about that connection between delight and abundance. Buying into that idea full-on would be emotionally catastrophic — I mean, maybe those “hipsters” are unhappy, but watch an episode of Hoarders and decide for yourself how delightful that abundance seems.

This contrast — between joyful collecting and anxious hoarding — raises some big questions that push the discussion on abundance into an important area. It’s clear there’s a line where things go from joyful plenty to horrifying excess. But where is that line? And why do many of us seem to have so much trouble staying on the healthy side of it?

A clue to our precarious relationship with abundance lies within our own brains, and the neural wiring that underpins our emotional responses. Many emotional reactions are triggered unconsciously by aesthetic (or sensory) elements. Aesthetic elements can take on different meanings through cultural encoding and personal experience, but underneath these layers there is often a kernel of biological inclination, shaped by evolution. One example, which I alluded to in my PT post, is people’s general preference for curves. A primal, unconscious part of our brain (the amygdala) has an intrinsic, background-level fear response to sharp corners, a reaction that makes sense. This emotional response raises our alertness around potentially harmful objects, and by consequence, our chances of survival. The response is purported to have developed over the more than 80,000 generations of the Pleistocene era when humans were evolving into their present form, and were surrounded by an environment where the angular things they might have encountered included cliff edges, tree branches, and predators’ claws — all things around which it’s unwise to be too cavalier.

I believe there’s a similar evolutionary principle going on with abundance, a hardwired predilection etched deep into our brains. My view is that a preference for abundance is a natural residue of generations of evolution in an environment where “too much of a good thing” conferred greater chances of survival. This is why we pig out beyond satiation at buffets and why candy stores make us feel like kids — because these things are aesthetic signifiers of a secure resource stream, something we are predisposed to celebrate and revel in.

At the same time, what was adaptive in the Pleistocene can be maladaptive in the post-industrial age, especially when taken to extremes. For most of us living in the first world, the unpredictable cycles of plenty and privation have been leveled out to such an extent that our greatest want is a lack of ripe mangoes in January. Abundance runs amok; it clogs our arteries and our atmosphere and it accumulates not just in the homes of hoarders, but throughout our environment. It hogs resources, giving some people unimaginable riches while consigning many more to persistent scarcity. This state of affairs is clearly not joyful; it’s rife with guilt, anxiety, and shame. When the population of humans was small relative to the available resources, and resources came and went in uncertain cycles, an insatiable craving for abundance made sense; now, this proclivity can be a truly destructive influence.

But our genes don’t know this. So the hardwired emotional responses that once worked so well to enhance our well-being and survival are now sometimes odds with the same ends. We stuff ourselves, shop-till-we-drop, and hoard because on some level it feels good, even if consciously we know it’s not good for us. Fortunately, we are not slaves to our genetic predispositions. While their influence over our behavior can be profound, it is modulated and controlled by a frontal cortex capable of understanding the dilemmas we face and making necessary tradeoffs. One way we do this is by exercising control over our actions, turning down a second helping or politely declining a tempting sales pitch. Another way is through the design of our environment, and this is where I think an aesthetics of abundance could be quite powerful. Can we design a feeling of abundance without the actual abundance, i.e. without having to use a lot of material, or hoard a whole ton of stuff?

What follows are a few early observations on the idea of aesthetics of abundance, along with some examples. Celebrations such as festivals are a big inspiration in this area, because they often feature abundant, yet temporary, displays, meaning they often need to feel big but be small enough to pack away later. Balloons are often used to create a sense of abundance, even though the actual material they consume is comparatively small. Confetti (though problematic in the cleanup), is another example of a product that creates a sense of abundance with little material. Surface treatments, such as patterns, can also create a feeling of abundance, particularly stripes and polka dots. I love how these stripes on the side of the Barcelona Flower Market seem to swell and move, suggesting the bounty inside:

Designer Paul Smith certainly understands this principle as well:

Another example — these polka dots from the Trash: Any Color You Like project take a feature of city life that normally fades into the background and makes it feel more abundant (an effective way to get people to reflect on the consequences of abundance!).

Variegated color and texture treatments also work to create abundance. Because of the rainbow hues, these chopsticks feel like “more” than they would if they were all one color.

A feeling of abundance can also be created with form and texture, such as with the ruffles that are in shop windows across the country right now for spring.

Abundance is not just about form, but also about context. A teaspoon of sprinkles feels abundant on an ice cream cone; in a giant field, the same teaspoon is insignificant. The cornucopia symbol is apt — abundance needs something to spill out from, a container to press against. It’s easier to make a small home feel abundant than a big one, which is a counterintuitive principle of some comfort to us small-apartment city dwellers. By designing small frames, we can make the things inside feel more bountiful. There’s also a role for design in illustrating the line between abundance and pure excess. That’s part of why the Design*Sponge “Sneak Peeks” are so satisfying. They show managed clutter, abundance in balance. Like a healthy psyche, they are full of emotional experiences, memories, and desires, arranged with some acknowledgment of a rational super-structure. Effusive, but not chaotic.

Like anything taken to extreme, abundance ceases to be joyful once it crosses a certain line. Science doesn’t offer much insight as to where the line is; we just know it when we see it. Love in excess becomes infatuation. Self-confidence becomes narcissism. Neatness becomes compulsion. Too much of any good thing is no good at all. The overstuffed houses of hoarders and the ultra-minimal, bare bones interiors featured in design magazines are two ends of a spectrum of beliefs about homes and happiness. I could just as easily take on the hoarders as the zen-modernists, except for one thing — no one is advocating the hoarder lifestyle. Even the hoarders view their condition with shame. Minimalism, on the other hand, is often preached as a lifestyle nirvana — a blissful, transcendent state achieved by letting go of material things. For some people, this kind of muted emotional landscape is a relief, a break from a high-stress job, information overload, or a plethora of buzzing devices. But for most of us, I’d contend that this kind of environment runs against our emotional nature. We’re made to feel joy in an abundance of color, texture, and sensory stimulation; it’s what makes the neurons fire and the brain grow and develop. Rather than fight it, I’d love to see us use design to create a more sustainable kind of abundance, one that gives us delight without compromising the joy of generations to come.

Images: Barcelona Flower Market via yatzer; Paul Smith Mini via Flickr; trashbags by Adrian Kondratowicz; chopsticks via DWR; ruffles: S/S 2010 shows by Oscar de la Renta, Valentino, and Colette Dinnigan, via Style.com.

Murketing: Clutter, Objects, Joy
Psychology Today / Design and the Mind: Unhappy Hipsters: Does Modern Architecture Make Us Gloomy?

This unassuming little book caught my eye the other day. Inside is a series of simple photos highlighting a phenomenon I’ve long considered joyful: plants that have managed to break through hard urban surfaces and green up the cracks in the city environment.

It’s hard not to feel a sense of delight at the pictures of these little sprouts, and their triumph of living matter over inert concrete, vegetable over mineral, soft over hard. As one reviewer put it, these scrappy, weedy things are “the underdogs of the plant world.” They’re like pioneers pitching a colorful tent in a harsh landscape, brave things that are cheerful in the face of long odds.

I Think I Can looks to be part of a six-book series by Partners & Spade. Another title in the series is The Benefits of Looking Up, which also seems to have joyful potential.

Matt sent me these whimsical images of public structures “fixed” with legos. The pieces are done by artist Jan Vormann, in an attempt to “support Mayor Bloomberg in his everyday-struggle to make this city even more amazing!”

Between these and the precious potholes I featured a couple of weeks ago, I’m starting to see a theme around the idea of “joyful repair.” Add to these some of the initiatives at Droog’s takeover of Governor’s island last fall, such as Heleen Klopper’s Woolfiller, and there really seems to be a pattern. I see this as an emerging desire to salvage damaged things, to fill in gaps and holes with something beautiful, whimsical, and colorful. Of course, these are not serious attempts at repair (Woolfiller excepted), but they get us to pay more attention to our environment, and the condition of the world around us, in a joyful way. There’s something compelling about the motivation behind the work — the need to make something whole, and not just whole, but somehow better and brighter than it was. These pieces suggest that a repaired thing can be not just as good as, but better than a new thing, and for me, this is what makes these provocations go beyond humor and novelty to be truly, deeply joyful.

Recently, the website Science and Religion Today invited me to answer an intriguing question: what architecture or design works best for places of worship? I shared a few thoughts with them on aesthetic elements that tend to put people in a spiritual frame of mood, regardless of religion. Read my answer here.

What is your favorite place for spiritual communion? Why? I would love to hear your thoughts.

Image: Osaka’s Church of Light, designed by Tadao Ando. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Artist Pete Dungey says of his Pothole Gardens, “If we planted one of those in every hole, it would be like a forest in the road.” Indeed. And a gorgeous, surprising example of urban renewal and joyful activism.

{via for the love of bikes}

Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home…. Maybe it is a good things for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always later, so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it. For a house that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to the house we were born in, would lead to thoughts—serious, sad thoughts—and not to dreams. It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.

— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

I’ve been dreaming about this house, on the island of Elliðaey in Iceland, since I saw it here. Apparently the house was a gift from the government of Iceland to singer Bjork for raising the country’s global profile. Then I saw this quote by Bachelard and started to feel a little better about the fact that I don’t live in it. I may never get to live in anything quite as remarkable as this, but I find great joy in the houses of my daydreams, and it makes me wonder if sometimes there isn’t as much joy in desiring as possessing.

My latest post for my Psychology Today blog is generating a lot of great discussion in the comments about architecture and emotion. The post uses the phenomenon of the blog Unhappy Hipsters, which assigns new captions to photos from Dwell and other design magazines, as a springboard for questioning the emotions evoked by modern design aesthetics. I argue that there are ways in which modernism is fundamentally in tension with the aesthetics of joy, particularly when it comes to angular forms, desaturated color palettes, and minimalist or restrained tendencies. Though it sounds as if I’m a modernist-hater from the premise, if you’re a regular reader you know that’s not the case. In fact, I’ve posted on the opposite topic — confluences between modernism and joy — more than once before. The post was inspired by the old adage, “it’s funny because it’s true.” I was curious if the humor in Unhappy Hipsters stemmed from a larger, mainly unconscious issue with modern design. The post was an attempt to provoke some reflection on some of the salient features of the style/ideology of modernism and why they might be at odds with positive affect. I’m heartened to see the level of debate and thought in the discussion, and I’d love to hear your thoughts as well.

Fascinating piece by Daniel B. Smith in Sunday’s NYT magazine about the emerging field of ecopsychology, which studies the relationship between the health of the natural world and that of the mind. The field views mental health more broadly than any preceding branch of psychology, suggesting that our sanity is inextricable from the vitality of our surroundings and the strength of our connection to them.

This makes intuitive sense to me. After all, our physical health is deeply dependent on the health of our immediate environment. Perhaps before the Industrial Revolution we could have conceived of our bodies as separate entities, impermeable to pollution. But now we know that chemicals in our waterways end up in our veins and that smog chokes our lungs as much as our visibility. The link between environmental soundness and mind is less apparent, but still plausible. If we evolved for an environment filled with the aesthetics of lush, green life, but we live in an environment that deprives us of these aesthetics, isn’t it possible that this state of being becomes like a nutritional deficit of the mind? That robbing our environment of certain essential stimuli decreases mental performance and makes us not only less happy but also less functional?

There are already disorders recognized to have a relationship to the stimuli we take in from our environment. The appropriately named SAD (seasonal affective disorder) is a kind of depression related to the low levels of available light in winter. SAD is worst at higher latitudes where the light difference between seasons is most extreme. Yet some Scandinavian peoples, such as Icelanders, have been found to have an immunity to this condition, perhaps because it was selected as a favorable survival condition by evolution. This is only one data point, but it suggests to me that people may evolve for certain environments, that our brains may be subtly wired through generations of interactions with a place, and that the rapid rate of change (/devastation) of those places could be a latent source of emotional trauma.

Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht terms this trauma solastalgia, which combines the Latin solacium, meaning comfort, and the Greek root -algia, meaning pain. He defines his coinage as “the pain experienced when there is a recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault…a form of homesickness one gets one when is still at ‘home.’ ” It’s an instantly evocative word to match an evocative concept (though perhaps not so precise — I can think of lots of cases of comfort-pain that have nothing to do with place). Smith notes that the word has spread rapidly, not just in academic or journalistic circles, but as a title for songs and works of art. The idea of defending our land as a people is nothing new, but throughout history usually it is from invasion, and what we are defending is livelihood — the resources for living and the livelihood we have created in a place. This goes much deeper to say that environmental destruction is a slow, creeping invasion, and what we are defending is not just our livelihood, but our sanity.

The most interesting aspect of this discussion, for me, is the recognition of certain kinds of environmental aesthetic stimuli as essential to mental health. We know that the brain is a sensing, processing machine, requiring constant stimuli to make sense of the world. Remove all stimuli, and people quickly go insane; without new data points, the brain stops making sense of itself. Too much stimuli and we become overloaded — equally unhealthy. But beyond variations in quantity, there are also variations in kind to pay attention to. Are there certain qualities of light that better enable us to function? Are there proportions and perspectives that make us feel in balance and emotionally secure? (For example, having evolved in an environment where trees have a certain proportional relationship to the human body, say between 2x and 8x as tall, does living in an environment that is more vertically structured, up to 220x in height maybe, create a sense of insecurity? I wonder this as a devoted city-dweller — I love skyscrapers, but is there another level on which they are making me anxious? Would I be smarter or calmer if I lived in the forest?)

One study, done by Peter Kahn, a developmental psychologist and member of the editorial board of a new journal called Ecopsychology, suggests that natural stimuli effect our physiology in basic ways. Kahn tested a group of adults subjected to mild stress while looking at one of three different views: a window looking out over a scene of grass and trees, a 50″ plasma screen of the same scene in real time, and a blank wall. Measuring the heart rates of the subjects showed that they decreased fastest in the group looking at the real nature scene, while those looking at the TV had the same results as those facing the wall. This suggests that not only does environment unconsciously effect our reactions, but also that we can’t fake it. An authentic aesthetic experience is necessary to feel the benefits of the interaction with the natural environment.

What does this have to do with joy? Many of the stimuli we consider to be aesthetics of joy are natural and environmental. Sunlight, lushness, open and expansive spaces. The emotion joy evolved at a time in human history where there was no dichotomy between artificial and natural — before industrialization, before agriculture, when our connection to the environment meant survival. The ideas of ecopsychology — solastalgia and the idea of an ecomental system — resonate so strongly with me because of this history. Joy isn’t a result of what goes on in the mind alone; joy is an ecomental interaction, a constant dialogue between the brain, the senses, and the things we encounter in the world. It’s often said that happiness comes from within, but joy comes from without — from the impressions made by pleasurable things on our retinas, our fingertips, and our tongues, the way they disrupt the flow our thoughts and focus them on beauty and wonder. For me, this piece was an important reminder that those wonderful, natural things may be instrumental not just in joy, but in the whole of mental health — and therefore an important reminder that so much depends on our willingness to defend them.

NYT: Is there an ecological unconscious?
Illustration: Artwork by Kate MacDowell; photograph by Dan Kvitka for The New York Times

It’s been three years since I last let myself read fiction. In these years of study and transformation, there have always been factual gaps that needed filling, lacunes in knowledge, crevasses into which curiosity swelled, all-consuming. Narrative felt like an impermissible indulgence, empty calories, dangerously unproductive. Countless times in the last year I browsed the tables at bookstores only to demur, to put myself off with a quiet promise of “December,” as if that month would be the break fast of fiction, a buffet of stories with world enough and time to read them.

As soon as I heard the subject matter, my first choice to dip my toe back in was obvious: Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin. The book’s impetus is the famous 1974 tightrope walk by Philippe Petit between the twin towers of the World Trade Center, one hundred and ten stories above the ground. A magical, subversive, absurd act of transcendence, arrogance, and grace — Petit’s walk has captivated me from the first moment I knew about it. Any work similarly inspired by this exquisite moment had to be my kind of book: joyful, at least in some measure.

In reality, the walk is only a minor player in the book, and Petit is effaced by his function and by characters far more emotionally grounded and present. Let the Great World Spin is really about their mundane poetry, their strange connections, their peculiar urban unity of grit and joy and loss. But the walk runs like a thread through the book, tugging a reader (sometimes reluctantly) into the repeated introductions of new narratives, cold loose ends that spark and warm as they loop back into familiar territory. I wish the walk itself was more powerfully entwined in the lives of the characters in each individual vignette. And I wish we did not know whether or not the walker would fall. But these are minor quibbles in an adept journey.

I won’t spoil the story for anyone who might like to read it. But I will say what I am most struck by is the twin impulse towards joy in both Petit and McCann. Petit’s motivation was transcendence, even as a consequence of transgression. From the moment he first encountered them, he saw the towers as an opportunity to create art, to give not just New York but the whole world a momentary gift of joy through the stretching of our concept of what is possible in the world. They were a joyful canvas, those towers, a base on which to layer joy upon joy, by taking a stroll in the sky and not falling out of it. I can only think of a handful of acts that are comparable in the way they transformed our emotional sense of possibility. First transits, such as the walk on the moon, or first discoveries, such as of electricity, telephony, and flight, come to mind. But the analogy is imperfect. Those discoveries were linear demarcations of befores and afters. They expanded possibility in a permanent way, heralding irrevocable change. Petit’s walk was transient because it was confined to one man’s extraordinary ability. It expanded the world of human potential, then contracted it again. It bore no actual relevance to anyone else’s daily lives, and yet, magical thinkers that we are, it captivates us, even those of us like me who were barely a germ of an idea in two strangers’ brains at the time of its occurrence.

This timeless magic makes it the ideal catalyst for McCann’s sort of joy, which is joy in redemption. Petit’s act of creation, though it predated 9/11 by 27 years, seems the ideal antidote to the towers’ destruction. Aesthetically, Petit’s climactic moment is one of rising, hovering, and dancing, of lightness, buoyancy, and air. The towers denouement is falling, crumbling, and burning, fire and ash, earth and bone. The image of Petit’s unlikely defiance of gravity burns in sharp contrast to the towers equally unlikely fall. Chronology is no matter, as aesthetics of joy can be permanent in our souls.

Of course, the real redemption is in the art that juxtaposes the two, that offers to replace this pitted hole in our world with a new image. This is McCann’s task, as he observes in the reader’s guide that accompanies the paperback edition:

But stories are there to be told, and each story changes with the telling. Time changes them. Logic changes them. Grammar changes them. History changes them. Each story is shifted sideways by each day that unfolds. Nothing ends. The only thing that matters, as Faulkner once put it, is the human heart in conflict with itself. At the heart of all this is the possibility, or desire, to create a piece of art that talks to the human instinct for recovery and joy.

I love the confluence at the end of this statement — between instinct, humanity, redemption, and joy. A central premise of my thesis is that joy is fundamentally human, an instinctual gift of evolution that rewards our struggles and propels us forward with the promise of its rediscovery. By this logic joy is also directly related to the survival instinct. We exist to seek joy, and we strive to continue to exist so we can seek more of it. Joy is an essential motivator, not just for creation, but for life itself.

Petit’s walk was an affirmation of the possibility that joy could come of out nowhere, on clear dull day, and transform us. McCann’s book, for me, is a testament to the persistence of that joy and its relentless tendency towards renewal.

Get Let the Great World Spin on Amazon.
Read more about it on the author’s site.
See Man on Wire, the documentary about Philippe Petit’s 1974 walk.

In this week’s New York magazine, Justin Davidson has a review of the new Eero Saarinen show at the Museum of the City of New York (a wonderful place, so if you’ve never had the opportunity to visit, this might be a good chance). The title of Davidson’s review is “Joy Constructed,” so of course this caught my eye and started me thinking that perhaps Saarinen might represent a counterpoint to the hard-edged, rationalist, emotionally-muted modernism represented by the Bauhaus and the International Style — a truly joyful modernist.

Looking at the swooping railings, ceilings, staircases, and arches in the spread above (from New York magazine), I can’t help but feel uplifted. But why? I’ve previously suggested that curves and round forms have a primal appeal because they are connected with safety. As children we are naturally drawn to objects with non-threatening surfaces, and the more broad and neutral the curve, the more safe and approachable an object is. (No one’s going to cut themselves on a beach ball.)

As it turns out, there’s science to support this idea. In a 2007 study published in the journal Neuropsychologia, researchers demonstrated that angular objects and shapes are perceived as significantly more threatening by the emotional brain. Showing curved and angular variants of the same object (a watch, a pitcher, a candle) and abstract patterns to a group of volunteers resulted in markedly different activity in a part of the brain called the amygdala, which is involved in threat and fear reactions and responds far more quickly than the conscious brain. Angular objects create much more activity in this part of the brain than curved objects. This makes sense in the context of survival within a primitive world — sharp angles are rare in nature, and usually do signal danger, or at least something we should be alert to: teeth, claws, cliff edges, and so on.

Human nature is a funny thing. You can build upon it, channel it, develop it to its greatest potential, but you can’t fight it. I look at the rigid rectilinear solids of modernist construction and I think of them as an attempt to put human nature in a box. To suppress these innate responses. But the unconscious elements within us react whether or not we want them to — they are uncontainable. In thinking of Saarinen, along with Zeisel and Aalto and other modernists who embraced the curve, I see a modernism that runs along the contours of our natural inclinations, an aesthetic that is conducive to joy.

Joy isn’t rational, and it seems fitting that Saarinen would say of his water tower design for GM (below) that it “is a departure from the completely rational.” It’s an unexpected admission for a modernist, and yet a fitting one for a designer who, in Davidson’s words, was spurred on by,  “the dogged pursuit of joy.”

Painted by street artists El Tono and Nuria in Cordoba, Spain, these doors look like portals to somewhere special. And they probably are.

Cordoba is known for its courtyard gardens, of which the occupants are famously proud. I remember when I was there meandering the winding alleys, a good-natured young man a few years older than me and speaking no English insisted on leading me somewhere. I was 21 and wary, but he was headed the direction I was going anyway and so I followed at a distance. After a few minutes of walking this way, me suspiciously noting street names, him laughing at my suspicion, we arrived at a house with door wide open, framing a lush garden with an old woman sweeping the tiled floor. His home! After I greeted his mother and admired the courtyard, I was free to go, giddy and bewildered by the surprises that lay behind those foreign doors.

{via Unurth}