aesthetics of joy

I’m  still trying to put my finger on what exactly is so joyful about Bzzzpeek, a site where you can play recordings of what children think animals sound like in different parts of the globe. Is it the sweet, earnest quality of the children’s imitations? The general cuteness of the site design? Or just the charm of being able to travel the world via quacks and ribbits? I don’t know, but the moment it appeared in my inbox (thank you, Jon), it brought a smile to my face.

The deeper question here is why we feel the need to imitate animal sounds when we have words to describe the animals. Before we had language, “Moo,” was a good way to alert neighbors to a food source. Now, when we can say, “There’s a herd of cows grazing just over the grassy knoll,” “Moo” seems terribly obsolete. Of course, there are still a few functional reasons to make animal sounds: birders do it to attract different species to look at, pet owners do it out of some empathic desire to connect with their pets. But why do children do it? I wonder if there’s some innate pleasure in imitation, or if there’s some other reason why we simply enjoy making animal sounds. Thoughts?

Ice cream trucks from around the world! What is it about trucks that lend themselves so readily to decorating?

via Let’s Color

Yes, that is Desmond Tutu in the midst of all those children jumping on a bed! For a project called Play Jump Eat, Kelly Wainwright of Messy Monkey Arts managed to coax not just the Reverend Archbishop, but also fishermen, surfers, schoolkids, and others to let go of their inhibitions and be photographed in odd situations, bed-jumping.

Jumping on the bed is an example of a joyful pleasure at its most democratic: an activity that is accessible to nearly everyone. It’s a childish pleasure, one we associate with being small in the expanse of our parents’ beds, but it can be rediscovered at any time. (Confession: I sometimes can’t resist a jump or two in a hotel room.) There’s just something so totally liberating about jumping; it’s a slightly transgressive, freeing feeling that brings laughter and optimism up to the surface. Even just looking at these photos evokes a vicarious burst of delight!

I hope the full series will eventually be posted online. Read more about the project here.

{Via @vpostrel}

Update: Kelly pointed out to me that prints are available here and that a portion of the proceeds benefit the Tertia Kindo Arts Project, a children’s dance school. The comments also made me realize that I failed to credit Inge Prins, the photographer on the project. Lovely work!

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.

This whimsical series of photos by Jan von Holleben has me totally charmed. There’s something so sweet about the landlocked restaging of childhood fantasies of flight: Peter Pan, Superman, The Red Balloon, etc. It looks like it would be such fun to be one of the kids in the photos. It also highlights a connection I hadn’t noticed before — the link between childhood and a fascination with flight.

So many characters in children’s stories fly: superheroes, fairies, wizards. Many toys fly as well, from balloons to paper airplanes, kites to whirlygigs. There’s something enchanting, liberating about flight and I wonder if children are more fixated on flight or just less inhibited about imagining it. As we get older, the characters in our stories tend to keep their feet more firmly on the ground, and even our dreams seem to have less flying in them, or at least that is the case for me. As a child I used to spend many nights leaping through the air in REM sleep; now, I covet a dream where I even get a few feet off the ground.

It’s also interesting to me how these photos illustrate the joyful gestures of flying. If we take away the props and the settings, what’s left are splayed-out, arms-up gestures that stretch the body wide and open. With no context, you could still understand the form as those of bodies in flight. There is an exultant quality to these bodily shapes; they are delight in contour, revelry in sinew. Joy thrives in this unthreatened openness, this delicious expansion of a physical being into its space. It makes me wonder how we might incorporate more of these kinds of gestures, in stills or in movements, into everyday life.

I am a big fan of snow. I know it’s inconvenient. I know it piles up in big drifts that make it hard to get around. I know you have to shovel it within 4 hours in Brooklyn or you’ll get a ticket. I know it looks pristine for about 30 seconds in the city and then it turns poo-brown and ugly. I know all this but there’s really nothing you could say that would make me love snow any less.

My first reaction to snow is always a visceral call to memories of childhood joy: “Snowday!” Just the barest snippet of a winter weather forecast or a “storm warning” brings a rush of delight. As a child, a forecast of snow meant I immediately put down the books and pencils and stopped doing my homework, and started dreaming of sledding and hot chocolate and the general indolence of a holiday in the middle of the week. Occasionally the snow failed to materialize, and I was on my way to school with a pack full of unlearned knowledge and bad excuses. But usually the comforting voice of the local radio announcer would announce my school closed along with my best friend’s, and we would grab our matching orange plastic sleds and head for the hills. As an adult, I see snow, and I turn right back into this little girl (in the red, on the left):

There’s a personal joy for me in those memories — in having them and sharing them. But I think there’s a deeper, more profound joy to be found here, one that is more universal because it derives from the aesthetic experience of snow. There’s something magical about snow, the way it drops from the sky with the lightness of cotton, and yet rests so heavy on the earth. There’s a sense of awe created too, by the extent of its scale, both macro and micro: snow covers everything, quickly and indiscriminately, and yet miraculously, because the scale of each flake is so diminutive.

These are common joyful elements that I have written about before, but looking at the commonalities illuminates the many facets of snow’s delight. With its lightness, snow is like bubbles, feathers, dandelion seeds, marshmallows, and meringue — transcendent things that are made of and at home in the air. With its scale, snow can be like the ocean, the redwoods, or the Grand Canyon — awe-inspiring in its vastness. And yet, as tiny things, snowflakes are like jewels, like haikus, and like hobbyist’s miniatures — joyful things made precious by the intricacy they possess in such small scale. Snow’s magic is the magic of invisible sources, of something from nothing. A snowfall is a slow-unfolding abracadabra moment of a rabbit being pulled from a hat, an extended display of the tangible emerging from the intangible as it blows and accumulates into drifts.

Underlying all of this, for me, is a kind of joy of transformation. Snow is itself a shapeshifter, first light, then heavy; small, then large. It is moldable, a substrate for transient sculpture, be it snowman or snowangel, or merely a snowweapon in the form of an icicle or a ball. But more significant is what snow does to what’s around it. In this sense, snow is an intrusion, a new element that transforms its context by its presence. Snow’s intrusion into a city is all-encompassing. Snow’s color and texture redefine the setting. Its volume and density redefine the action. It blankets, it bleaches, and it slows. Snow changes our behavior; it gives us permission to be more playful. And snow changes the feeling of even indoor spaces, making them more intimate and cozy.

The pleasure of this transformation is heightened because we know it won’t last. Days, sometimes weeks, after the first magic act of its appearance, snow performs a second one, disappearing into what seems like nothing. We revel in it because we know it’s an evanescent joy. And we’re not sorry to see it go because we know that like all true delights, it will come again.

{Thanks to Rachel for inspiring this post!}

There’s something so delightful to me about this midcentury child’s table and stools set with its colorful wedge-patterned laminate surfaces. I think the splayed tripod legs look kind of anthropomorphic, like an unsteady toddler, which adds a sense of a cuteness to the appeal.

{via Dwell}

A small note of shameless self-promotion: my Animo kid’s chair is being exhibited at imm Cologne, which runs today through the 24th. The exhibit is part of a collaboration between Pratt and Germany’s Folkwang academy called “Take a Seat.” You can see some of my co-exhibitors here. I’m very excited to have my work showing at this amazing international venue and with such talented designers!

The chair was inspired by watching the way children move: joyfully, experimentally, and totally unselfconsciously. Intended for experimental learning environments such as museums, it supports these healthy movements through a unique system of energy absorption. Based on the tensile balance of a highly elastic material (bungee cords) and an inelastic one (nylon panels), it translates a child’s energy into a dynamic visual display. More info about the chair, including models that show how the mechanism was developed, is here.

Also, I just want to give a public “thank you!” to the amazing John Medley, who fixed the prototype after the tension from the bungee cords bent it out of shape — John definitely saved the day.

Yes, the Georgia O’Keefe show at the Whitney was joyful, but this magenta-haired lady in the lobby stole the spotlight this weekend. Pink hair on a teenager is ho-hum, but the same shocking hue on a more mature subject is a delightful surprise.

I just hope when I get older I have similar confidence to not always act my age!

Virginia sent me this a couple of weeks ago with the note: “This little guy is in the Bargello in Florence and always seems like the epitome of joy.” I couldn’t agree more.

Baby fat, sweet little wings, and the upswept gesture all give him an infectious kind of aura. It is always interesting to me when sculptures manage to achieve such lightness in heavy materials like bronze and stone. But my favorite part about the statue is the way he balances on a scallop shell. It makes the proportions odd and surprising, and sets a foundation for the composition that is just a little bit magical.

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 you’ve ever wondered what a water balloon looks like right at the instant it pops (don’t you lie awake contemplating this?) — here you go. These photographers clearly have vibrant inner children!

{images: CameraShyMom, A.Connah, herbe_nelson}

I love the form and craftsmanship of these tops by KleinReid for Herman Miller in homage to Charles and Ray Eames; the proportions are sweet and they seem like they have a nice weight to them. But they have the appearance of toys that are meant to be looked at, rather than played with. I wish they had a pop of color, maybe just a couple of thin stripes running around the latitude, like piping on a garment. It would make them more approachable, more like toys and less like executive desk ornaments.

(Compare with the color-dipped axe handles from the Best Made Co. — an axe is not a toy, but I have to say that these make slinging wood look like more fun than spinning it.)

On the other hand, these quirky KleinReid vessels are incredibly haptic. I can almost feel the slightly irregular, muted, glazed surfaces in my mind, and imagine looping a finger through the perfectly-scaled openings to carry one home. The drippy edge where the glaze meets the foot is imperfect, but the imperfection is tantalizing. They have a similar gestural quality to the tops, but the exaggerated proportions, color, and tactile surfaces make them seem more toylike to me.

It’s remarkable that utilitarian objects and decorative objects could have more playful attributes than an object designed to be played with. But then, at $199 a set, perhaps the tops aren’t really meant to be played with at all, and the design is a fitting balance for an object whose relevance is more symbolic than functional.

Tops can be purchased here, when they’re back in stock. Axes here. Vessels here.

A simple way to make a mundane object more joyful is to transform it using aesthetic elements of an object you already know is joyful. Designer Wieki Somers’s Merry-go-round coatrack takes a garden variety museum cloakroom and uses the form, scale, and movement attributes of a popular playground toy to transform it into a delightful spectacle.

The coatrack was installed in 2008 in the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam.

{via Core77, where you can see a film of the piece in action}

Wrapping up the post-game fashion week joyfinding, it’s time to let the inner child out. The Barbie-loving, Bubble-Yum chewing, magenta tutu-wearing little girl inside of me danced around the apartment when she saw these light, confected pinks, and then ran off to eat pashmak for breakfast.

The cotton candy vibe extended weirdly even to the hair at some shows, where technicolor riffs on afros (almost none of them black) sweetly framed the traditional model death-stares. Vuitton took the cake for volume, but it was Rei Kawakubo’s stiff, fuzzy ponytails that managed the fine balance between kawaii and cool, and really captured the irrepressible joy of spring.

L to R, Top: Paul Smith, Lanvin, Carlos Miele. Bottom: Luella, Louis Vuitton (I almost wrote Vuitoon – Freudian slip?), and Commes des Garcons. There were candy colors (not just pinks) at tons of other shows — Giles, V+R, etc. Also, Tavi made a rainbow of Lanvin dresses that is worth a peek.

I’m lying low this weekend to work on the book (the rainclouds above have thoroughly endorsed this plan) so you may see a few atypical weekend posts. Happy Friday!

Design is at its most effective when it encourages or transforms human behavior for the better. There’s a lot of talk about how we need adopt healthier or more eco-friendly habits. The onus is on us to make the changes, but design can facilitate the behavior and make it easier or more enjoyable to change. Examples abound: the George Foreman grill, dedicated recycling bins, 100-calorie snack packaging. All of these things make it easier to do the right thing. Easier, yes, but not necessarily any more pleasurable, which is where The Fun Theory comes in.

An initiative of Volkswagen, the Fun Theory is a series of experiments that demonstrate how joyful design can encourage positive changes in behavior. In the video above, a staircase goes from being the less-chosen alternative to the escalator to the preferred path after the addition of some giant piano keys. In another video, litter collection rises after an amusing noise is introduced to a public trash can.

The pre/post measurements are striking and really prove the point that aesthetics of joy — through interaction, play, sound, and surprise — can create real, immediate change in the way we live.

{via PSFK}

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}

Every now and then I have a look to see what search terms are bringing new visitors to the site. It’s always interesting to see how people find the site and what topics readers are most curious about. My favorite among the search queries of the past month is “Why is bubble wrap so good?” bringing people to this earlier post I wrote exploring the subject.

It delights me that there are others out there who wonder why bubble wrap (or rainbows or cupcakes or fireworks) bring us joy. These questions may seem unimportant in the face of all we are confronting at the moment, but they speak to profound curiosities about our human nature and our world, curiosities that are no less important for being about what creates pleasure than about what helps avoid pain.

Re-reading the earlier post, I think my answer is still the same, but I’d add two things. First, bubble wrap has a certain amount of magic to it because it contains air in a permanent way, in contrast to all the bubbles of natural world. Bubble in water float to the surface, bubbles in air pop, bubbles trapped in ice eventually melt. So bubble wrap makes the elusive air bubble tangible in a way that seems mundane but is actually quite magical.

The other thing I would say is that it also has something to do with sensory immersion. Bubble wrap has a unique tactile sensation, and it’s also an aural experience. This richness contrasts with many materials which have expected textures and that don’t “speak” to us. Bubble wrap could be an even richer sensory experience, and in fact there’s at least one person out there who intends to make it so. Check out this genius patent I found for scented bubble wrap. It’s like the love child of bubble wrap and the scratch ‘n sniff sticker.

And finally, here’s a fun bubble wrap fact: did you know that it was an accidental innovation? The inventors were actually trying to create a new kind of easy-to-clean wallpaper! Thankfully, the experiment went awry and the world’s most joyful packing material was born.

Image: Feeline
Original post

Toys suck. Well, not all toys, but many of the new ones. You play with them once and then you’ve figured it out, and there’s no more pleasure to be had from the experience. Designer Dror Benshetrit says of experiences like this, “Toys with quick and linear paths to gratification have less longevity,” and I think he’s spot on. Ironically, the simpler a toy is, the less simple the experience. If you watch a child play with a stick or a ball or a cardboard box, you see the hours of enjoyment that come from manipulating these very basic forms in a variety of ways. Because of their simplicity, they don’t indicate an outcome. Instead, they provide points of departure for many different kinds of play. In imaginative play, they become props for an array of fantasies. In physical play, they become obstacles or building blocks. In social play, they are transformed by the interplay of ideas and decisions made by a group.

It occurs to me that this idea of non-linear play experiences connects back to my earlier post on circles and roundness as an aesthetic of play. If you think about it, the ability to come back to a toy repeatedly and continue to get value out of the experience is a cyclical process, and cycles are just a temporal version of a circle. So good play involves not just circles in form, space, and movement, but also time.

Simplicity gets sabotaged by the greedy designer. Says Harry Allen,

I worry that in our desire to sell toys to children, we do too much of the work for them. Toy designers have all the fun and leave little to the child’s imagination. One quickly tires of overly designed toys, but one never tires of one’s own ideas.

It’s an interesting notion: that toy designers are naturally those who like to play, and sometimes get overzealous in that process, keeping too much of the fun for themselves and overdefining the experience. To me, Puzzibits are a perfect example of that excessive design. I was excited when I first saw them because I love all kinds of building toys — Legos, blocks, and my absolute favorite, Tinkertoys. I loved the idea of Puzzibits because their rubbery material means that they’re flexible, an exciting twist that opens up the possibility of creating organic forms. But the reality just doesn’t meet the promise.

The flatness of the pieces means that they lend themselves most readily to 2D creations, which is fine, but not as exciting as the 3D forms. This is a problem of affordances. Affordance is a design-y word for the possibilities that are designed into an object or space; they are the ways in which form dictates function. Doorknobs and handles present a really good example of affordances that Donald Norman uses in his book The Design of Everyday Things. A round doorknob affords turning. A vertical handle affords pulling. A long horizontal bar affords pushing. You know if you’ve ever tried to pull a “push” door how frustrating it can be when the affordances of the design don’t match the intended action. In designing utilitarian objects, the goal is usually to constrain the affordances so that it’s clear how the object is to be used. A door that needs a sign that says “Pull” means that the form is not doing the work it should to make it clear how it’s supposed to be opened. “Pull” is effectively a one-word instruction manual for a door, an object so simple it should never need one.

With toys, the goal is the opposite: affordances should be as broad as possible. The more ways a toy can be manipulated, the more possibilities it engenders. Too few affordances, and the usage becomes linear and finite, which is what happens with Puzzibits. The rigidity of the attachment points means the pieces have to be connected in a coplanar way. That simple choice of connector design makes it very easy to achieve 2D compositions and very difficult to create 3D ones. The designers solve that problem with a manual. If a manual is undesirable in a functional item, it’s positively deadly in a toy. Manuals are not fun. Using them consists of following directions, and directions are nearly always linear in nature, prescribing an outcome. In this case, the manual shows constructions like animals or vehicles that can be built (prescribed outcomes). But even when the suggested outcomes are inspiring, the creation of those things requires such a dull, one foot in front of the other process that it’s like putting together IKEA furniture. On the other hand, free play with the toy is so constricted by the narrow affordances that it’s impossible to make any satisfying new discoveries.

This idea of new discoveries is so essential to what play’s all about. It’s about opening ourselves up to the unexpected, and that can only happen when the ending isn’t written into the form of the toy. Simpler forms lend themselves better to complex possibilities because less of their story is already written, leaving more for the players to create themselves. We know classic toys have a deep resonance that continues into adulthood. It also continues for generation after generation of children who discover the same pleasure that their parents and grandparents felt at interacting with these simple objects. It’s not nostalgia that embeds these toys into our psyches, but rather this aesthetic of simplicity that allows us to infuse them with personal meaning.

It’s a good principle, not just for toy design, but for emotional design of all kinds. Leaving room for the customization, interaction, and play by designing in an open-ended way allows users to write their own stories around their objects and relate in deeper, more personal ways. When it comes to aesthetics of joy, in some cases, less is definitely more.

Image: Ivan M