aesthetics of joy

Were the fantastical plots by Lewis Carroll (a.k.a. Charles Dodgson) in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland a playful way of attacking new ideas in mathematics? This piece by Melanie Bayley in the New York Times gave me a sense of amazement and delight. She suggests that Alice’s rapid changes in size and proportion are a satire of mathematician Augustus De Morgan’s purely symbolic system of algebra, while the Mad Hatter’s tea party is stuck in time because the characters are obeying the principles of William Rowan Hamilton’s principles of “pure time.”

If this is true, it puts a wonderful new lens on one of my favorite joyful books. To visualize mathematical concepts and properties through the behavior of characters is such a clever way to make these ideas accessible, and to expose both their appeal and their absurdity. It’s an ingenious way of adding a layer of emotion to rational concepts, infusing a dry academic debate with charm and relevance.

NYT: Algebra in Wonderland

A new collaboration between Evian and Paul Smith has produced this energetic bottle design. @PSFK says “Another designer water bottle. Yawn.”

I tend to agree that the world has enough fancy h2o packaging, but I happen to love Paul Smith and his vibrant aesthetic. It seems to stem from a genuine curiosity about the world and a playful (there’s the word of the week!) spirit. From what I’ve read by him and about his design process, I’ve found him to be a very inspiring, yet humble guy.

What do you think… is it joy? or yawn?

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.

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?

Roger Cohen has a wonderful op-ed piece in today’s New York Times about the recently published study showing that rhesus monkeys fed a restricted calorie diet (30% below normal intake) live longer than those who eat what they please. He views the study as an opportunity to pose the question, “What’s life for?” Is it for enjoying, with life-shortening indulgences like chocolate and cheese peppered throughout? Or is it for something else, in which case the longer the better, whatever the cost?

Cohen points to this photograph of monkeys Canto and Owen to suggest his answer:

Which brings me to low-cal Canto and high-cal Owen: Canto looks drawn, weary, ashen and miserable in his thinness, mouth slightly agape, features pinched, eyes blank, his expression screaming, “Please, no, not another plateful of seeds!”

Well-fed Owen, by contrast, is a happy camper with a wry smile, every inch the laid-back simian, plump, eyes twinkling, full mouth relaxed, skin glowing, exuding wisdom as if he’s just read Kierkegaard and concluded that “Life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backward.”

Is this a living example of aesthetics of joy? It occurs to me that enjoyment has its own aesthetic, that its not just the things enjoyed but the results of enjoyment that are aesthetic. Owen communicates joy (as much as a caged primate can, at least) in his roundness, his expression, his glossy wellbeing — the products of accumulated moments of joy in his life. Canto evinces an aesthetic of deprivation, and like parched land, hunger strikers, and disappointed children, deprivation evokes a primal aversion, decidedly not joyful. So is there something to this idea of fat and happy?

NYT: “The Meaning of Life”

Today I was interviewed about “joywashing” by Virginia Prescott live on New Hampshire Public Radio‘s Word of Mouth, a show about trends and culture. The interview was great fun — I love talking about joy in its many forms, and especially its rise in popular culture.

You can hear the segment online here after 3pm today. And here are links to the ads from French’s, VW, Clorox, Trident, and BMW discussed.

Previous joywashing posts on this blog include one on Clorox and one on Trident, in case anyone’s looking for a more in-depth discussion of the phenomenon.

One point I didn’t have time to make in the interview that I want to add. . . Unlike greenwashing, joywashing doesn’t present a dangerous threat. I meant what I said when I indicated that an abundance of joy in marketing probably is a good thing, and certainly won’t hurt anyone. But that doesn’t mean it’s right for every brand. Not all products should be marketed as joyful products. And this glut of good vibes will definitely make it harder for any one brand to stand out.

Marketers run a very real danger of poisoning the well by jumping on the joy-wagon without backing up their advertising claims with product design or service gestures. Like any major cultural shift, the rising tide of optimism has the potential to be an opportunity or a threat. For those marketers that realize people are looking not just for sugar-coated messages but for uplifting products and services and experiences throughout their lives, the joy wave presents a good opportunity to leave a deep and powerful impression on their customers. Or it could be a fast-track to being perceived as inauthentic. It’s all in what you make of it.

Thank you to NHPR and Word of Mouth for inviting me on to share these thoughts with their listeners. Have a joyful afternoon!

These pudding packages, all designed for the same brand by Dusseldorf-based Yvonne Nieweth, make a great case study in emotional design. Each one is different from the next in the quality and intensity of emotion it evokes. Which ones seem the most joyful to you?

Via TheDieline. See the images larger here.

My post describing the phenomenon that I call “joywashing” has provoked some interesting discussion online and off. In the meantime, examples keep coming. This morning while catching up a couple reruns of Top Chef Masters, I was struck by this new ad from Clorox Cleanup. The voiceover goes:

When everything’s just the way you want it. When it’s so clean there’s nothing left to think about and nothing left to do. That’s joy. The pure joy of the pure clean that comes with Clorox Bleach.

Then the tagline: pure joy. pure clean.

If cleaning had an emotional territory in the past, it was zen. Cleaning was about calming the storm, taming the flow of mess, getting things under control. The clean home at the end of an ad was a picture of stillness — just Mom and her well-deserved cup of tea, with even the dog neatly groomed and obediently seated. When the economy was good and we worked too hard, the emotional quality of home we aspired to was relaxation and zen-like tranquility. Home was a refuge against the busyness of the outside world. Now, in the days of pink slips and furloughs, all that peace and quiet feels isolating and, honestly, a little scary. Home now needs to be a place of vibrant energy to counter the gloom that surrounds us. The cultural significance of “home” has shifted, and smart marketers will realize that this requires a different kind of emotional content to sell products for this space.

I actually like the ad and I think the territory is a credible space for a cleaning brand to play. Clorox is perhaps a little harsh and I think it would more appropriate to their green cleaning brand or another, gentler sort of product. But there is kind of a joy to the moment they’re describing, when all the work is done and the house is really, truly clean. They’ve backed it up with joyful aesthetics: pops of color that stand out in the white rooms, high energy movements, that well-placed giant bubble, and music that has a soaring quality that matches the tone.

The language may be a little strong. I think that “pure joy” might be an overpromise and it’s risky given the joywashing trend to be so reliant on words like “joy,” “happy,” etc. The reality is that when words like this are so overused in a given time period they become very fluid. We think we know what these words mean because they are so fundamental to our language, but when they are claimed and associated with many different products and experiences in such a short timeframe, their meanings are volatile and susceptible to shift. The word “green” is the best recent example of this.

So, is Clorox’s joy-of-washing positioning joywashing? Perhaps, but my instinct says it will do ok for them. It may require some nimble thinking to maintain differentiation once the rest of the competitive space latches on to the idea. Product or packaging innovation to support the promise would help, because while the aesthetics of a clean home are consistent with joy, the acrid tang of bleach is decidedly not. I don’t know that they can do anything about that (bleach is bleach), but perhaps new scents or gentler formulations could provide sensory support for the joy positioning. It will be interesting to watch how the home space, and especially cleaning brands, evolve in this new emotional context.

There’s a joy wave afoot, and every marketer from here to Timbuktu is trying to get in on the action. We get it. We’re in the midst of the Great Recession, people are gloomy, and if you’re going to flog more sportscars or soda or chiclets right now pretty much the only way to do it is to sweep us off our feet in a haze of good cheer. But all cheery marketing campaigns are not created equal.

“A little piece of happy” should be joyful. After all, that’s one way to define what joy is: little pieces of happiness. But this campaign isn’t joyful. Some of the items are entertaining, like the happy news feed and the Pandora playlist. Others are just dumb, like the pic of the chihuahua wearing goggles or the image of the two starfish holding hands (the caption reads “star crossed lovers” — har har). But my real problem with it is that it just seems like a novelty, a gimmick — all talk, no real emotion. Just because it’s timed to the recession with a peppy vibe doesn’t make it a winner. Would you visit this site more than once or twice? Would you post it on your facebook page or send it to half your address book? Do you now suddenly feel a rush of delight every time you chew a piece of the same old Trident?

I think this campaign is joywashing — the shameless use of happiness or joy to convince us to buy more stuff. Real joy is deep, repeatable, and contagious. And unless there’s something special in the formula, it doesn’t come from a stick of gum.