aesthetics of joy

Over the past few days, I’ve been watching as the Christmas trees are put out to pasture on the city streets. For these first few weeks of the new year, it’s like an urban forest has sprung up from the sidewalks, already half-dead and dejected. And it occurs to me that it’s a good example of an object whose emotionality is transformed by context. A Christmas tree in the living room is a festive delight, a beacon in the room, a centerpiece to gather around. A Christmas tree in the street is waste wood, a symbol of extravagance and indulgence. Before December 25th, a Christmas tree is an aesthetic of joy and anticipation. After Jan 2nd, it’s trash to be dealt with, with connotations of loss and sadness. Time and place radically redefine the emotional meaning of this object.

Countless other objects experience similar emotional redefinition in our lives. The security blanket we thought we could never live without becomes embarrassing in our tween years. A precious gift from a lover becomes anathema after a breakup. A knickknack that always seemed ugly in a childhood home can suddenly seem joyful in our own. As I thought about these examples, and the Christmas tree, it reminded me of an early idea I had in my work on joy — the idea of emotional sustainability.

One of my goals with Aesthetics of Joy was to explore the emotional relationships between people and things, to try to understand how we could design things in more emotionally satisfying ways. Emotionally sustainable objects are the things that manage to stay relevant to our feelings over long periods of time, bringing joy repeatedly as we interact with them and use them. By contrast, emotional obsolescence is the quality of things that wear out their welcome, providing an initial burst of satisfaction that is not replicable. I realized early on in this project that emotional obsolescence and functional obsolescence are often out of sync, so that we have things that are broken but still emotionally valuable, and equally problematic, we have things that are emotionally obsolete but that work perfectly. Our landfills are dense with both these types of items — items with residual, unexploited value. And when we look at the problems of designing for sustainability, I think we can’t ignore that just dealing with biodegradability or disassembly or planned obsolescence is not enough. Truly sustainable design takes emotional value into account too.

It occurred to me as I looked at the Christmas tree that objects trigger positive emotion and fit into our emotional lives in different ways. Some are intense and euphoric, like a new gadget; these occupy significant but transitory spaces in our hearts. Others are joyful: they elicit strong feeling, though less intense, that comes and goes in waves. These things are repeatedly joyful throughout long periods, or even our entire lives. And then there are contentment objects — things that give us a low-level glow, a soft, pleasurably feeling of security. These objects are not the ones we desperately covet, but our emotional bond with them is durable. A antique chair or soft rug might be an example of this kind of object.

No kind of object is inherently better than any other, but just like a balanced emotional life, we need to keep things in healthy proportion. A sane emotional life has lots of contentment, some joy, and occasional encounters with ecstatic novelty. Our object lives should probably be similarly balanced. Lots of things that are soothing and make us feel good, a bunch of wonderful things that are truly joyful, that make us smile whenever we encounter them, and the occasional transitory novelty. The thing is that each of these categories of objects has different design imperatives from an aesthetic and a material standpoint. Gadgets, whose emotional character is intense but emotional life cycle is short, have the aesthetics right (sleek, sharp, and über-shiny), but the material wrong. These objects should be totally transient in their design, able to fit seamlessly back into the biological and technical cycles McDonough and Braungart propose in Cradle to Cradle. Other objects that have more lasting emotional relevance need not worry as much about end-of-life issues, but should be designed for durability, so that they can be maintained and passed on.

Misalignment between physical design and emotional character is rampant. The Christmas tree, which started me down this whole line of thinking, is a perfect example. 33-36 million Christmas trees are “produced” (um, cut down?) in the US each year, and another 50-60 million in Europe. The tree’s emotional character is joyful, its appeal recurring at the same level and at precisely the same time each year. But, its design is out of step with that character, because (practically speaking) it must be killed to be transported, and it cannot be preserved or stored. This creates huge waste. What’s needed (if we were going to design one from scratch) is a Christmas tree that lasts forever and yet shrinks down very small for storage. It also needs to have all the multisensory appeal of a real tree, and perhaps a kind of quirkiness that makes it look different every year. And best of all it would be size-adjustable, so that it could grow with a family as they move between homes over the years. Or, another way to design it might be to create a system of local tree farms that minimize transportation cost and waste, paired with a system for using the discarded trees that somehow extracts value from them.

These might be silly approaches, but the point I’m trying to make is serious — namely that emotional life cycles can serve as a guide to product life cycles, telling us what is appropriate aesthetically and materially in design. My ideas on this are still evolving, and I’d love to hear your thoughts.

{Photos via Christmas tree}

No question that the economy has the fashion industry feeling hacked to bits, and this was apparent on the runways. At Commes des Garcons Rei Kawakubo’s clothes looked artfully pieced together from odd bits salvaged from a besieged factory. Interspersed with elegant minimalist pieces, Raf Simons’s show at Jil Sander had a few pieces with opaque layers largely eviscerated and overlaid with netting. But no one expressed the bathetic anguish designers felt at having their wings clipped with more humor and charm than Viktor and Rolf.

I can only imagine how the faces of the front row must have lit up to see these gored, sliced, and shaved tulle gowns come down the runway. Yes, they are marred by violence. But they’re so sweetly absurd that for me they are still an aesthetic of joy.

A brief departure from the aesthetics of joy to consider a very different kind of aesthetic…. I’ve never seen anything like these Sydney dust storms and I must say they freak me out. A world gone red is an eerie aesthetic, like something out of a sci-fi film. Out of curiosity I’d love to be there to witness it, but at the same time I think I’d find it really unsettling.

I write a lot here about the pleasure of oddity, when something defies our expectations of what it should be like. In this case, the sky is defying our color expectations, being red instead of blue, but it’s frightening, not joyous. A rainbow changes the color of the sky too, but our reaction is the opposite. I think magnitude must be an issue here. A red sky surrounds us ominously, its origins vague, its duration uncertain. A rainbow is distant, comparatively small, and fleeting. Color is one of the most powerful and immediate aesthetic signals, but its meaning is inscribed in scale and context.

Photos: Flickrblog

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

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

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

I have a post in draft form (that I hope, eventually, will see the light of day) about universal vs. individual aesthetics of joy. Of course everyone has different things that bring them joy, but they don’t necessarily conform to what would be defined culturally as joyful aesthetics.

My project generally focuses on the more general, more universal aesthetic patterns because it makes it easier to draw lessons that can be applied broadly to design. But occasionally I come across what I would call a “counter-aesthetic” of joy: an object or space that on the surface looks to be the very opposite of joy, yet someone has managed to wring delight from it.

The trigger nearly always has to do with personal experience, as is the case here, with these photographs of the Gowanus Canal by José Gaytan. Gaytan, a Brooklynite who grew up in Juarez, Mexico, was attracted to the canal by a familiar smell. “That aroma is embedded in my brain,” he says, “a mix of sewage, kerosene and oil.” Which doesn’t sound so appealing, except that it reminds Gaytan of his handyman grandfather, and the junkyards he used to play in while he was alongside him on jobs.

This illuminates one of the true marvels of emotions in the brain. Aromas, colors, textures, sounds — all of these things can become associated with positive or negative feelings through experience and memory. Especially aroma. Current research suggests that smell is processed differently in the brain from the other senses, and may therefore have a stronger link to long-term emotional memories. So a smell (stench?) that for most of us might connote filth in need of a Superfund cleanup, for someone else evokes the joy of childhood.

Where this gets interesting is art. To feel joy where others don’t is wonderful, yet limited. But to try to shine a light on your joy and share it with the world, especially when it involves overcoming preconceived notions, is a powerfully transformative act and deserves a place in the schema of aesthetics of joy. A success in this regard is to make us see a place with fresh eyes. As Barbara Wing, curator of the Brooklyn Public Library’s exhibit of Gaytan’s photographs, says, “He really looks at details we don’t notice. The colors are fantastic, almost painterly.” Just as long as they don’t come with the smells. . .

Thanks for the tip, Dad!

Exhibit, at the Brooklyn Public Library, now through August 29th
NYT story