aesthetics of joy

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

I thought I’d posted these before, but it seems not. I love this simple, irresistible rethinking of the crayon. Available at Romp.

My dad says that when I was a kid and I wanted him to play with me I used to say “Plaaaaaaaaaaaaay!” in this little voice, all drawn out long and laden with a kind of affable insistence. It was code for, “Doesn’t this look like a lot more fun than that big stack of dictation over there?”

When I see these Charley Harper memory cards, that inner child pipes up again with her invitation, except this time it’s aimed at me. It’s really hard to focus on work when someone makes games this beautiful.

Available here, and very reasonably. A nice gift for the children (and inner children) in your world.

I’ll be back tomorrow with more thoughts on the aesthetics of play. In the meantime, today I’m posting a few of the toys my inner child is currently coveting.

Hidden magnets make these blocks a magical remix of the old wooden ones, allowing creations that wouldn’t have even been fathomable before.

Huesito blocks from Tegu. Get them here.

In human cultures, we value aesthetics for their own sake — for the pleasure to be derived from creating new aesthetic combinations and from experiencing those of others. But from the perspective of an organism, aesthetics are just a signal, a means to an end. Color, texture, form — these things are not important in themselves, but in that they indicate a happening that might be relevant for our survival. A flash of yellow on a rainy day is an aesthetic signal of an approaching taxi that may provide shelter and transportation. A yeasty aroma on a side street is a signal of freshly baked bread that might provide relief from hunger. A shiny reflection on a matte concrete bench is a signal of wetness — it could be a spilled drink, or worse, but in any case it’s an indication of a spot that might not be so nice to sit on. Yellow, yeast, and wetness have no intrinsic value to us, except for what they tell us to approach and to avoid.

I mention this because too often we think about aesthetics as static attributes, when actually they are evidence of a world constantly in motion. And play at its very root is about motion: the physicality of interaction, the gestures of discovery, the spin/slide/run/jump/pull/push of a body testing the limits of its freedom. This is why I wrote in yesterday’s post on free play that the aesthetics of play can’t be simplified down to a color palette and some out-of-scale, toy-like properties. The aesthetics of play are signals of something much deeper. They are sensory manifestations of the very essence of what it means to play.

So what are the aesthetics of play and how do they relate to this essence? I’m going to unpack this idea over several posts, starting with today and the idea of roundness.

Many of the most essential playful objects are circular or spherical: balls, hula hoops, spinning tops, marbles, balloons. This is no accident. Play starts with childhood and the child’s need to explore the world around her and understand the capabilities of her own body. Play at its root is about testing basic principles like gravity, momentum, and cause and effect. To do this, a child needs to interact with objects, and interaction requires contact. Contact has the potential for playful reward, but it also has the potential for danger, and so we gravitate towards non-threatening objects, ones without the sharp corners or rough edges that might hurt us.

Roundness is a primary signal that an object is safe, and therefore a key element of the aesthetics of play. Within this broader idea, there are shades of gray. The perfectly neutral curves of spheres and circles are safest. They’re also the most predictable in the way they behave, allowing us to anticipate and react to their movements. (Contrast the bouncing of a perfectly round ball with a misshapen one, and you’ll see what I mean.) Other gentle curves have a similarly playful feel, one that gets lost when the curves get too slick and fast. Many toys exhibit this principle. Toy cars designed for very young children are often bubbly and round, while older children crave more realistic, sleeker versions.

Roundness also applies to the motion of play. In other words, we don’t just play with round things, but we make ourselves round when we play. In a 2008  NYT article called “Taking Play Seriously,” the head of the National Institute for Play, Stuart Brown, said, “Play movement is curvilinear. If that boy was reaching for something in a nonplay situation, his body would be all straight lines. But using the body language of play, he curves and embraces.” The curvilinear movement is an instinctual behavior that serves to let others know that our behavior is non-threatening. But rounded movements and gestures also feel pleasurable and safe to ourselves. Perhaps this is why so many large-scale playthings move in rounded ways: the merry-go-round, the ferris wheel, and the swingset, for example.

Roundness itself does not constitute playfulness. But roundness is an aesthetic of play when it represents an invitation to interaction. I’ll talk more about the quality of that interaction in my next post, and its implications for other aesthetics of play.

Images: Toys: balloons by anniebee, marbles by van Ort, paper balls available at Romp, hula hoop by morgen. Cars, top by Strawberry Kids, bottom by Automoblox.

I had a great weekend. My family was in town on Friday and Saturday and I had a blissfully work-free couple of days with them. On Saturday, my 10 year-old brother Rob and I took a walk and found this high school track, complete with long-jump run and sand pit. Rob has lately been getting into track and field, and knows all about Usain Bolt and other speedy individuals and the records they’re making and breaking. He’s also super-speedy himself, and a very athletic kid in general. I suggested he take a few jumps and I photograph them, trying to see if I could time the shutter just right so I could get him in midair.

But after 2 or 3 jumps I couldn’t help myself, and I had to play too. In 5 seconds my shoes were off and I sprinted barefoot down the rubber runway, launching full-tilt into the air in some sort of modified jeté. It was a feeling of complete freedom, like the way it feels to fly in a dream. The moment my feet touched the ground, I wanted to do it again. We took turns jumping and photographing each other, and honestly I could have played there all day.

As a kid, this sort of spontaneous physical play was natural, and I find myself missing it as an adult. How often I would like to kick off the high heels and play an impromptu game of tag or race a friend to the nearest streetlight, or walk a railing like a balance beam. Free physical play, play that has no purpose and no immediate end, is powerful in its ability to destress and enable creativity, and provide a conduit to the kind of joy this blog celebrates.

There’s a lot to be learned from formal definitions of play. Stuart Brown, the head of the National Institute for Play, describes play as follows. It’s apparently purposeless activity, meaning it’s one of the few things we do for its own sake, not as a means to some end. It’s voluntary, and we have an inherent attraction to it (as do many animals). It provides a freedom from time and a diminished consciousness of self, which means that play creates a perspective shift where we forget about how we look and our to-do lists and become totally present in the moment. Play also provides improvisational potential, meaning its not overly prescribed, an extremely important but often overlooked criterion. And play creates a continuation desire; in other words, we’d like play to go on as long as possible, and once it’s over, we’d like to repeat it soon after.

To the letter, this was my experience at the track this weekend. Though there are 19 years between us, Rob and I had the same inherent attraction to the play experience. We both felt lost in the moment, and had no consciousness of time passing. While in air I didn’t care whether my hair was out of place or how good a jumper I was. (In fact, Rob is a much better jumper than I am, but I’ve redacted the photos until he’s at least old enough to have a Facebook page!) The activity was incredibly simple, yet was open-ended enough to provide endless potential for improvisation: jumping in different ways, launching at different points in the track, spinning or performing other silly stunts in midair. And the continuation desire was evident in the fact that Rob and I both had to do “just one more” jump a few times before we could tear ourselves away.

“Play” has been a popular buzzword lately, and yet it often seems to be used without a real understanding of the ideas described above. Designs are described as playful if they exhibit childlike qualities, but just being brightly colored and out-of-scale doesn’t necessarily make something playful. Play is about attitude, behavior, and affordances, something that manifests in aesthetics, but stems from something inherently deeper than that.

I’ll be exploring play’s role in aesthetics of joy on the blog this week, and showing some examples of how the spirit of play manifests itself in the design of objects and experiences. Do you have stories or thoughts on play and joy in your own life? If so, write them in the comments — I’d love to hear them.

Yesterday I posted on miniature sweets and the perspective shift that comes from out-scaled items. On the opposite extreme, giant sweets seem to captivate artists and designers the world over. And because their enormity makes them impossible to overlook, the giant objects seem to have an even stronger Alice-in-Wonderland effect.

Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s Dropped Cone makes me feel like a Lilliputian living in a land where if I’m lucky, I might catch a dripping from a giant toddler’s melting ice cream. Martha Friedman’s Waffle (currently on view here in Brooklyn) and street artist Celso’s Apples have the similar effect of making me reconsider my own scale and the scale of all the common objects around me.

Of course, scale shifts can go both ways. Oversized objects can have the effect of making us feel ill at ease with our place in the universe and out of control of the events that shape our lives. Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s Knife Slicing Through Wall sculpture highlights this darker side of scale shifting. But sweets are inherently joyful — the sugar, the color, the aroma of baking, the ritual of eating — so giant treats create a much more pleasurable transformation of perspective: magical, childlike, and fun.

Brooklyn designer and studiomate of mine Azusa Hirota brings this whimsical quality to functional objects, allowing interaction with these giant sweets, instead of just viewing. Her chair, a giant cupcake, puts the user in between the cake and icing, so that you’re literally surrounded by the experience. Everyone I’ve seen sitting in it seems to have a big smile on their face. Her giant doughnut, designed in collaboration with Tawny Hixson, transforms a common inner tube into an object of delight. I remember my days spent tubing down the Nam Song river in Vang Vieng, Laos, and it strikes me that it would have been such a wonderful thing to see fellow travelers drifting gently downstream on giant Krispy Kremes!

See more of Azusa’s work here. Thank you Maggie, for the waffle tip that inspired the idea for this whole post!

Did I miss any wonderful giant sweets out there? Let me know.

Video and computer games are not really my cup of tea. Yes, as a kid I played my fair share of Mario Brothers on my old first generation gray Nintendo box, but the games these days have gotten so elaborate, photorealistic, and violent that they’ve lost all joy for me. But a few years ago I did discover one exception. Orisinal, the “personal playground” of flash game designer Ferry Halim, is an oasis of innocence and charm in the increasingly intense world of computer gaming.

Playing an Orisinal game is like being in the best children’s book you ever opened. It’s a world filled with leaping frogs, quacking ducklings, sliding monkeys, exuberant puppies, flowers, bubbles, and balloons. The enemies in the games are snails, puffer fish, bouncing bunnies, ladybugs, “cranky” crabs, or falling acorns. The premises are simple, based around natural or childhood themes, yet the situations are novel and sometimes comical. In the game Bugs, you’re a little girl trying to blow a bubble and keep the ladybugs from popping it. In High Delivery, you use a fan to blow a bottle hanging from a upward-floating balloon towards magically-suspended roses, which appear in the bottle when caught. And in Chicken Wings Are Not For Flying you throw umbrellas to chicks jumping out of their nest so that they can have a soft landing on the ground.

The soft palette and charming style of the animation, plus the original situations and sweet music, make the Orisinal games a great example of joyful aesthetics that are approachable to both children and adults. You may find the games don’t reward serious playing — I confess I just open them to check out the illustrations but don’t really make an effort to play them — but they’re still very enjoyable and inspiring just to look at for a little while.

Today’s first bit of joy comes from illustrator/photographer Garance Doré’s wonderful vacation shots of a little girl she met on the beach in Corsica. A friend once said to me that she frequently has the urge to dress like a little girl, pulling out an orange top and a pink skirt and believing that the two look just perfect together. Before the anxieties about body image, tween trends, and peer-pressures set in, girls take a pleasure in dressing that is deliciously pure. The little girl fashion sense revels in color, delights in texture, and gives credence to the David Hicks maxim, “Colors do not clash. They vibrate.”

This photo makes me want to do my errands in a skirt like that, worn with a t-shirt in some bright shade of red or yellow. And if it’s raining, maybe add some wellies and a striped umbrella?

The hula hoop is back in full force this year, seen in everything from designer window displays (thank you, Kate Spade) to fitness classes (hello, Hoopilates!). People must be looking for a little cheap and cheerful fun in their lives, and personally I think it’s a not a bad idea. I took a hooping class recently with a friend and it was so much fun I think hooping could be prescribed as a credible (and recession-friendly) alternative to Prozac.

The hoop is brilliant because it is not only an object, but also a space and an experience. As an object, the hoop bears features of many of the different aesthetics I’ve talked about on this site: the circular form suggests harmony and completion, as well as renewal. The large scale (hard to miss a hula hoop) suggests the child aesthetic, while the bright colors and patterns (as on these beautiful bespoke hoops) suggest energy and exuberance. Even before it’s set in motion, the hula hoop is an appealing object.

The hula hoop is also a space. The hoop demarcates a zone in which you are free from certain rules that apply outside of it. Inside the hoop, you are allowed — no, expected — to move your body in a way that would be considered bizarre and socially unacceptable outside of it. This makes the hoop an oasis, a place that offers temporary freedom from conventions that apply in the spaces around it. We often forget that spaces can be portable, but many other oases function in this way, emerging from an object: an ipod, a costume, a few balloons and streamers. The hoop isn’t a very big space, which in a way makes it all the more remarkable — if you can define a space using just a plastic circle, think of all the ways you could create emotional spaces for people without erecting any screens or walls.

And finally, there’s the motion, that wobbling gyration that brings the hoop alive. It’s a ridiculous movement, so absurd that it’s impossible not to smile while spinning a hoop around your waist. You feel self-conscious, but only for a second, especially at one of these classes where you look around and realize that old men are doing it and 7 year-old girls are doing it and some guy who sits in a cube all day looking at spreadsheets is doing it. Then your inner child takes over and you feel amazed that something so wonderful is so easy and so free.

Fads over the hoop come and go, but I think one of the reasons it has endured more than so many other more complex movement toys is that its simplicity creates possibility. The hoop is accessible to a novice, and while it can be challenging, it doesn’t take long to get it going in a satisfying whirl. But watching dancers work with the hoop as a tool, it can be amazing to see how many different movements they come up with. Many of the best toys share this ability to be open-ended (contrast with many current toys that are so prescriptive they lose their appeal after the first 20 minutes) and I think this is a key reason the hoop has lasted so long.

And by “so long” I mean 3000 years! Most people think the hula hoop was invented in the 1950s, where it became so popular that 25 million were sold in just the first four months. But actually a hoop made of vines was used as a toy by Egyptians as far back as 1000 B.C. It’s funny to think that one day thousands of years into the future archeologists may uncover our iphones and laptops and wonder what on earth they were for, but won’t have to wonder about hula hoops because their children will still be playing with them.

Top image by Little Rosy Runabout
Beautiful hoops available from Circle Candy
Bottom image by Tony the Misfit

Happy weekend, everyone.

Before I sign off, I just wanted to post this short item on the Brooklyn Flea’s scavenger hunt. I love this idea. They post a couple of photos of items on the blog, and if you find one of them, you get to keep it for free! What a clever, playful way to increase traffic and get people to check out vendors they might normally bypass, without making them feel like it’s being pushed on them.

Enjoy your weekend. I’ll be out and about in Miami for a few more days, swishing my feet in the sand and spending some time with my family. I hope wherever you are, you’re doing something fun!

When I was a kid I used to spend hours in the branches of an old beech tree. I knew every path to the sky through those gnarled branches, and used to sit up there just listening to the wind in the copper leaves, daydreaming of things to make and places to go. So if anyone could build me a studio of my dreams, it would be like this nest in a Hamptons backyard.

NYT: A Bird’s Eye View of Long Island

Tania sent me this great roundup of Japanese packaging characters from the now hiatused PingMag. Most of the examples on this site are sweet and charming, though we know Japanese character obsession can cross the line from cute to creepy. To Westerners, it can seem an odd intrusion — childlike cartoons on products made for adults, and hard to parse whether this is a joyful phenomenon or something darker. Having lived in Japan for a time and experienced the culture first hand, Tania offers this perspective: “Perhaps it has something to do with re-creating moments of child like wonder, innocence, creativity and freedom in a society that is otherwise highly controlled, regimented and driven by social hierarchy-based codes of behaviour.”

Personally, I happen to like the characters for just that reason. Never mind cultural hierarchies and codes of behavior; what about the rigid conventions of packaging design? Letting the inner child out to play is much more emotionally inspiring than subjecting us to even more overstyled, staid cookie photography. I’m also enchanted by the idea that a pink rabbit could appear on packaging for “Men’s” cookies! Maybe it makes it look like all the food in the world is candy, but hey, is that really so bad?

Thanks Tania for the tip

I don’t know if some animated characters can make reading emails and making calls into a “Joyful Adventure,” but LG Australia certainly hopes so. The website for their GM730 smartphone features games in which personified apps get together to catch flying emails and do “playful multitasking,” whatever that is.

Looking at the graphic above, it’s clear they’re trying to harness elements of joyful aesthetics: the tiny claymation cupcake village, friendly color palette, cutesy language, and glimmering phone. It’s a Childhood aesthetic, designed to trigger playfulness and nostalgia. But the whole thing is just a gloss on what’s presented as an otherwise ordinary smartphone. The characters, with charmingly original names like “Dialing,” “Contact,” and “Office,” do nothing to highlight unusual features of the phone. They’re just the standard apps, often the ones you wished worked better. Seriously, Dialing? Is that even a feature?

The TV ad takes the Childhood aesthetic a step further, with puppets whose style clearly references The Muppets and a brightly-colored set that echoes Sesame Street. Another device from Sesame Street used in the ad is the intermingling of puppets and people. It all combines into an aesthetic designed to stimulate our nostalgia and bring a halo of joy to the phone. The ad ends with the line “Joy. Now in a smartphone.” spoken by a V.O. with a laugh in her voice and spelled out in a friendly, rounded typeface.

But despite the frenzy of action in the ad, nothing suggests this is any different than any other smartphone. Why will this phone, in particular, make me so happy? Answer the question, and it’s a legitimate claim. But until the emotional claim is backed up with benefits, this represents another great example of the increasingly common, increasingly global advertising phenomenon of joywashing.

Thanks Ben, for the great tip.

Ponyo, the new film by Hayao Miyazaki, opens today nationwide, with rave reviews from NYT’s Manohla Dargis. She writes:

To watch the image of a young girl burbling with laughter as she runs atop cresting waves in “Ponyo” is to be reminded of how infrequently the movies seem to express joy now, how rarely they sweep us up in ecstatic reverie. It’s a giddy, touchingly resonant image of freedom — the animated girl is as liberated from shoes as from the laws of nature — one that the director Hayao Miyazaki lingers on only as long as it takes your eyes and mind to hold it close, love it deeply and immediately regret its impermanence.

Good question she poses. Is she right? Is it true that the movies have lately been confined to exploring the a darker or more muted range of human experience? When was the last time you saw a movie that was truly joyful?

NYT: Forces of Nature, Including Children

Art supplies are an addiction of mine. I love to go into art stores and walk the aisles, running my eyes over the rainbows of pastels, crayons, and pencils. I like to choose each color individually, reading the names, and feeling all the potential of that concentrated burst of pigment I’m holding, imagining what might become of all that spruce green, lilac, or vermillion. This obsession goes back as far as I can remember. While some kids dreamed about thousand-piece Lego sets or a full collection of Beanie Babies, I craved 30 different shades of blue.

So you can imagine how this set of pencils from Social Designer sent my inner child abuzz this morning. First there is the abundance, the sheer delight of 500 pencils, more than four times as many colors as Prismacolor makes. But then you don’t get them all at once. No, you get them in stages of 25 pencils at a time. Which means you have the feeling of abundance but at the same time you get the pleasure of anticipation, waiting for your pencils in the mail, wondering which colors will come in the next batch, dreaming about what you’ll do with them.

The batches create new forms of inspiration. With 500 colors you could be overwhelmed, but if this month the yellows arrive then perhaps you will be inspired to work in that palette and see where the color leads you. I also love to imagine what the set will look like when complete, because you will have had more time with some colors, you will have found favorites, and they will be shaved down to all different lengths. At the moment the set is complete, it is already in the process of being consumed.

When you buy a set all together, the set is complete at the beginning and is whittled away. As you make art, the set is slowly dissolving. But when the pencils arrive in stages, it’s like an evolving collection, and the art and the tools evolve together alongside each other.

As a writer, I also love the names. Of course, I love traditional pigment names too: ultramarine, scarlet lake, burnt umber, yellow ochre, and the already-mentioned vermillion. These names come from traditional natural and chemical pigments, and even if they are no longer made in those old ways, I love the connection to the past they imply. But the names of these pencils are deeply evocative and emotional, much in the way that CB‘s fragrance names are. I wonder about the smells of Burning Leaves, In the Library, and Memory of Kindness just as I wonder what I would draw with the colors Lobster, Mrs. Smith, Drizzly Afternoon, and Chicanery.

Via Daily Candy

Perhaps it’s a bit of an adolescent male’s vision of joy, but the bevy of bikini-clad models taking part in electronic musician Calvin Harris’s Humanthesizer (human + synthesizer) look like they’re having a pretty great time.

I love the use of technologies like conductive paint and Arduino to integrate a new level of play and freedom into the process of making music. You see a lot of these types of music and technology explorations at the twice-yearly ITP shows, but this is a level of human integration I haven’t seen before, and it strikes me as the beginning of a wonderful new genre of musical performance, involving beautiful collaborations between dancers, designers, artists, composers, and musicians.

Well, I’m back! And as hard as it was to say goodbye to my family and those magical, remote islands, I must say I did feel a rush of joy walking into my apartment late last night. I was exhausted from dawn-to-midnight travel, but it sure felt good to be home.

The Galapagos are everything people say and more. Their relative isolation for thousands of years means that you can observe at very close range all kinds of animals that anywhere else would flee in fear. It’s a little like scuba diving, that way, and it creates opportunities for all sorts of joyful encounters.

Take these sea lions, for example — our welcoming crew at the port on Baltra island. Most animals used to human presence become opportunistic; trained by handouts of food intentional or accidental, they are reduced to beggars. But the Galapagos sea lions greeted us with a disinterested sigh and the occasional snort. Napping on the benches and the steps of the pier, they made evident that this was their home and that we were free to come and go as we pleased but they were not going to trouble themselves about it one way or another. They let us get so close to them, closer even than one could get in a zoo, and with that physical proximity came a sense of almost spiritual closeness, because there was mutual trust and respect, so rare among man and wild animals.

The sea lions are the hedonists of the Galapagos, lolling around in the sand, napping for hours on sun-baked rocks, their eyes nearly always drowsily half-open. They cuddle, these sea lions, in twos or threes or eights or tens, their smooth fat bodies massed together, an occasional fin draped over one’s neighbor. You see so many sleeping sea lions in the Galapagos, you might wonder if they ever do anything else. But then you see them in the water, utterly transformed.

As indolent and awkward as they are on land, they are exuberant and agile in the sea. I was lucky enough to get to play with one while snorkeling, entirely on her terms, which left me equal parts terrified and delighted. The game she plays is this: she swims full speed from ten or so yards away, her snout aimed straight at my mask, looking with full determination like she’s headed for a collision. At the last second, she ducks under me, turning, swimming away for half a minute or so, leaving me a few breathless moments to get ready for the next round.

Over and over this happened, and I felt what I have so often tried to describe on this site — the repeatable rush of true joy. Each pass the sea lion made gave the same rush of delight, over and over again, and I know that were I to zip on a wetsuit and get back in the water tomorrow or twenty years from now, I would still feel that same wonderful feeling.

More photos and stories to come. I took over 500 pictures, so I have a lot of work to do before I put them up! Stay tuned….

xx Ingrid

Nudity comes in all forms. There’s erotic nude, artful nude, lascivious nude, tawdry nude. There’s shocking nude and boring nude, fantasy nude and reality nude, and (as per Seinfeld) good nude and bad nude. But sometimes a birthday suit is just birthday suit, and being nude is just about the freedom of skin and air, and nothing else.

Another item from today’s NYT explores this kind of joyful nudity — kids just wanting to be kids, unencumbered by clothes — and all the subtle issues this juvenile naturism causes.

It’s an interesting, nuanced treatment. I’d love to know what people think about this. At what age does going nude cross the line from joyful to uncomfortable? And does that age then represent a certain kind of turning point in life, in our relationship to joy?

NYT: “When Do They Need a Fig Leaf?”

It starts with babies. Tiny people with tiny ears, tiny noses, and tiny toes. Tiny hats and shoes follow, and for some reason these ordinary things, shrunken down to impossible proportions, give us a big swell of joy.

Kids get bigger, but the miniaturization continues. Toy cars, soldiers, and animals fill our days, all perfect scale models of the real things. Dollhouses — entire worlds in miniature — involve us in hours of joyful play. And I don’t know if it’s because tiny things remind us of these toys and the freedom of childhood, or whether we have a purely visceral reaction to their comical scale, but it does seem that many miniatures have a joyful quality to them and we often seek to miniaturize things even in the adult world.

Think about cupcakes, a craze you’d have to live under a rock not to have noticed. In recent years these small doses of sweetness have been in such high demand by adults, they seem to be capable of keeping entire blocks of the West Village economically afloat. Fruit is getting smaller too. Clementines and cherry tomatoes have been around awhile, but there’s been a growing prevalence of those tiny apples and pears, and now apricots (which already seemed pretty tiny to me) have shrunken into candycots, and watermelons have gotten “personal-sized.”

There’s a pragmatic rationale for small urban cars, but it doesn’t explain why drivers of the Mini Cooper and the Smart car always seem so smiley. We also find miniatures associated with special occasions known to be joyous, such as Christmas ornaments, souvenirs of famous places, and those bride-and-groom caketop miniatures without which any wedding would surely be incomplete. These “tiny worlds” designed and sold on Etsy by Amy Powers seem take a cue from these inspirations, trying to distill moments of joy into something small, pure, and permanent.

Miniatures are like suggestions of another world, a world of a different scale, but often also a world of a different time or place. Like these miniature tuk-tuks (which, even at life-size, are already miniatures) ensconced in the lighting fixtures of New York Thai restaurant (top photo), they bring distant memories or dreams into a concrete physicality. They also work on a purely visceral level, transforming the world around them in powerful ways. These lamps would look quite ordinary, but the mini tuk-tuks make them look enormous, like giant soap bubbles in comparison. Much the way our hands look giant when held palm-to-palm with a child’s, or a Great Dane looks like horse next to a toy poodle, our world reveals itself to us in new ways in the presence of an out-of-scale element. There’s a transcendence in that feeling that the world is larger than life, or in feeling like we’ve become kids again.