The world’s most joyful packaging material turns 50 this week. Go pop some in its honor!
Or live vicariously and feel the delight emanating off the screen from the bubble wrap scene in Wall-E. What does it say about our culture that we we envision such an oddly iconic pleasure as a connection point between two futuristic robots? What timeless part of our psyche does bubble wrap speak to?
On Sunday night I finally saw Avatar. I think I was one of the last people in New York City to do so. I saw it on the Imax at Lincoln Square. I can’t imagine what it would be like on a regular screen or without the 3D, but I’m sure it pales in comparison — just the sheer scale and immersiveness of the experience were dazzling.
There’s so much to say about the joy of this experience, (and also where it fell short), but the most compelling aspect for me is the world James Cameron has created in Pandora. I’m sure I’m not the only one who felt a little bummed to be back in the real world after the film was over, and found the transition from sacred trees to streets a little jarring. It’s a transition from a joyful world to a mundane one, from a place filled with magic and wonder to a city that feels dull and sublunary by comparison. And the difference is all in the aesthetics.
Cameron takes a seemingly ordinary rainforest (already a lush, joyful environment) and imbues it with light, movement, and magic. Everything native to Pandora glows: the trees, the seeds, the mosses, the waters — even the animals. The peculiar luminosity is celestial; the lichens become like a carpet of stars, the tree of life like a cluster of comets. (It kills me, by the way, that I can’t get still images to illustrate these things — evidently the Avatar PR machine is more interested in gunships and battles than the beauty of the setting. Did I miss something? Or wasn’t that just the whole point of the movie?)
Anyway, bioluminescence has long been a source of wonder here on Earth, whether in fireflies or glowworm caves or tropical bays of phosphorescent plankton. But in our world, it’s a rare pleasure, one that many people never experience firsthand. Cameron has taken this joy and scaled it up, creating a world ablaze with ethereal light. Pandora’s light is magical because of its inexplicable beauty — like the earthly bioluminescence it emulates, it operates through chemical light-making processes that seem mystical in contrast to the logical workings of electricity — like a hidden flow of energy.
“A hidden flow of energy” is Cameron’s actual explanation for the bioluminescence in the film. The scientists in the film state that the organisms function like a neural network, all connected to each other symbiotically. This connectedness is another joyful theme, since joy is very much about unity, coming together, and inclusiveness. The aesthetic illustration of this is the bond formed when the Na’vi encounter certain other organisms — the animals they ride to hunt, their mates, or the tree of life. The fusion of the illuminated tendrils calls to mind a kind of neural embrace, where disparate elements craving contact find each other and communicate wordlessly.
These energy flows are magical, and they manifest in other ways besides communication and light. The mountains of Pandora float in midair, like karst formations reflected in still water, and are described to be constantly moving. Creatures float as well. The seeds of the tree of life drift like glowing white-violet jellyfish, giving the impression that Pandora’s atmosphere is rich with this energy, changing its density at will from the thinness of air to the thickness of water. And of course, in the end, (spoiler alert) it’s a mysterious energy flow from the tree of life that saves our hero and Pandora itself.
It’s not just the behavior of organisms, but also their forms that display joyful aesthetics. Cameron uses the lushness of the rainforest, amplified in scale and density, to create a sense of vitality and renewal. He uses lots of spiral and circular forms, such as the small creature that spins on its fan-like wing (a living whirlygig), or the giant spiral-shaped plant that retreats into itself when exposed to touch (no doubt inspired in behavior by the real-world touch-sensitive mimosa). Swooping curves rule in Pandora, whether it’s chalice-like flowers, dangling curls of vines, or the delicate tendrils of the Eywa seeds. Cameron’s artists also play with scale, making some things giant, like the beautiful broad leaves the break the Na’vi’s fall as the leap from the sky, and other things tiny, like the seeds or the spinning creature. All of these are recurring aesthetic motifs in joyful things, both natural and manmade.
Ultimately, it’s these aesthetics of joy that make the Na’vi’s world so mesmerizing, and make us feel that this place is valuable and desperately worth saving. The aesthetics of magic and renewal give an impression that there is salvation for us in this place, not in the (clumsily-named) mineral unobtainium, but in the mystical goodness that underpins such manifest joy. For me, these aesthetics of delight in Pandora’s design do far more than the clunky dialogue and heavy-handed plot to suggest the moral. All of these wonders were inspired by things in our own world. Cameron has said he was inspired to create a bioluminscent Pandora by his experiences night-diving. The rainforest, though perhaps not as fantastical, is still a lush world rich with undiscovered species. Many of the animals on Pandora are hybrids of familiar organisms, like fearsome land-mammal with the rhino body and the hammerhead shark face, which call out these remarkable features — no less remarkable for the fact they occur separately in our world. And science lately is filled with new discoveries about the ways that flora and fauna communicate with each other chemically, much like Pandora’s hidden energy flow.
The more I think about Pandora, the more I think about the beauty of the world that inspired it, which is really the point here. Yes, the technology is a great leap forward, and yes, the 3D experience is revolutionary. But in 5 years this will be common, in 15 it will be primitive. I think the artistic achievement is much greater than the technical one, and more lasting, in the way it abstracts our world away from us, and filters it through a joyful lens, allowing us to discover its rare pleasures anew. Though at first it seems our world is at a disconnect from the magic of Pandora, actually, our world is filled with Pandoran moments, (or Pandora is just an amplification of earthly moments). What is joyful in Pandora is what makes it worth saving, and a good illustration of what makes our own world worth saving too.
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}
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!
From time to time this blog needs to consider serious subjects. Fortunately, today is not one of those days. This week the NYT style section gives us a thoughtful discussion of Lady Gaga’s significance to fashion culture, accompanied by a retrospective of sorts in slideshow-form. With so many examples and such a diverse array of looks to choose from, it’s hard not to have favorites. (See more looks here.) But which are the most joyful?
The overly burlesque looks are out of contention, as too much sex crosses the line from joy into some other sort of emotion. The fact that we’re going for inner child here, and not inner sex kitten, rules out a lot of looks. Most of her looks are evoking cool, or anti-cool, or just plain weird. While the ethos is playful, the aesthetics are by and large very adult.
But I found a few examples joyful aesthetics in the mix. The bubble-dress, below, has my vote for the most absurdly, childishly delightful look of the bunch. It’s almost as if she got swept away by a cluster of dishwashing suds and dropped onto the stage with no time to change. I love the way the colored lights reflect in the surfaces of the spheres, iridescent. The radiating hair-halo, above, also has a joyful quality to it — a costumey echo of a Medieval nimbus, or a warm, golden sun. I also like the reflective, light-scattering quality of the mirror ball look (bottom). The curves of the skirt have a joyful arc, but the sharp triangular panel earns demerits. Sharp things trigger a primal fear reaction deep in a part of the emotional brain called the amygdala. The heightened alertness and emotional intensity of sharp things is odds with joy, though it’s probably just right for the kind of reaction Gaga is typically going for.
Any other Lady Gaga styles that give you a sense of delight? Any joyful looks I overlooked?
NYT: When Lady Gaga Appears, So Do Her Many Influences
With all the holiday festivities upon us, I’ve been thinking a lot about joy’s celebratory side. (Please forgive if these thoughts are a little rough, as I’m also simultaneously editing my thesis document and my attention is a little divided.) It’s interesting to think about what kind of adaptive value celebration has in human life. Why do we celebrate? Or rather, why do we need to celebrate?
We know that cultures all over the world celebrate, and though we celebrate in different ways, we often celebrate similar things: lifestage transitions, marriages, births, harvests, seasonal shifts, and good fortune. And though celebrations of foreign cultures may seem filled with alien customs, aesthetically there are many common elements. Sweets, such as cakes or candies, are common, as is alcohol in cultures that consume it. Bright color, music, and dancing are typical in celebrations around the world. Light is a particularly important element, as in the Christmas tree, the menorah, and the fireworks displays that commemorate a range of festive occasions. And exuberant bursting gestures — like those of fireworks, but also the breaking of a piñata, the throwing of confetti, and the open-armed jump for joy — seem to originate from the very nexus of joy within the human soul.
It seems clear to me that celebration is a universal human drive that like curiosity or lust is hardwired into us by evolution. That the aesthetics of celebration also have universal elements suggests that perhaps these elements have had a long association with events to be celebrated (sweetness, for example, would be a natural correlate with fruit harvests, and light a natural relationship to seasonal celebrations). The question is, is celebration itself adaptive — does it have a function that aids in the survival of humans and the propagation of the species? Or is it a byproduct of evolution, having evolved in the company of other traits that enhanced gene dispersal? I haven’t read any definitive treatment on the subject, but I believe there must be at least some adaptive value. In his book The Art Instinct, evolutionary theorist Denis Dutton references the importance of social cooperation in the evolution that got Homo sapiens where we are today. I think celebration is like a social form of reward that motivates cooperation and helps maintain social harmony. It also strengthens bonds that may be needed in tougher times. (Perhaps companies who eliminate holiday parties in an effort to save costs might be well-advised to reconsider, given these insights.)
I hope you have a wonderful holiday this season, whatever you are celebrating! And if you have any thoughts on this topic, please share them: How else could celebration be adaptive? What are celebration’s benefits? How is celebration good for us?
Image: Michael™. Poor dog!
These joyful Christmas cones in Barcelona’s Mercat Santa Catarina square are bike powered! Passersby can hop on for a few minutes to keep the LEDs going. Now if only they could find a way to get the Rockefeller Center skaters to fire up NYC’s big tree…
See more bike-powered holiday installations on Vanessa’s joyful blog for the love of bikes.
Yesterday “Stripes!” and today “Fela!” This might be the week of exclamation point titles. They’re the most joyful punctuation, and with all the work and so little sleep, I’m getting a little punchy. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll write about those bushmen whose name has the ! at the beginning, the !Kung, and then finish the week out with some Lichtenstein paintings!
Please, don’t mind me. Sleep deprivation makes me giddy. (!)
But back to the order of the day, which is a short note about Fela! the musical, a biopic about the legendary founder of the Afrobeat genre of music Fela Kuti, which has just moved to the Eugene O’Neill from Off-Broadway. My friend Maggie scored free tickets to the Saturday night preview show and I just could not stay at home with the laptop with that on offer. It would not have been the joyful thing to do.
I arrived flustered and let’s just be honest, more than a little cranky. I left light as a feather. What happened in between? Music, of course — Fela’s soul-stirring, body-shaking sounds, brought to life by Antibalas, a Brooklyn Afrobeat band, charismatic lead Sahr Ngaujah and the sensational Lillias White. Dancing — not just by men who seem born in motion and women whose bodies seem to be all hips and no spine, but by you too, every last gangly uncoordinated one of you. And the color and energy of costumes that are positively kinetic in their vibrancy.
I couldn’t help but dig up a little history. This video shows Fela in concert — his songs were known to run 20 minutes or longer — so you can get a feel for the music and the joyous performance style if you aren’t familiar with it.
On the revolutionary music blog Revolucion, No you can find lots more about Kuti’s music, as well as these great images of his “queens,” the women who were his dancers and also his wives. These really give you a sense of the gorgeous energy that inspired Marina Draghici’s wonderful costumes and sets.
The translation from history to real life is so vivid, so immersive, that you can’t help but feel that you’re in a completely different world for a few hours. You’re certainly a long way from Broadway!
Read the NYT review: Making Music Mightier Than the Sword
See images of the sets and costumes from the show
Get tickets here
Whoa whoa whoa!
That was my friend Peter’s reaction to evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson’s NYT blog post this week, which discussed the connection between making certain sounds (such as “eeee”) and positive emotion, via what’s called the facial feedback hypothesis. Judson explains the link and then goes on to wonder: Do certain languages with “smiling sounds” make their speakers feel happier than others? Are some languages, by a curious accident of circumstances, languages of happiness?
Peter’s reaction was mine as well, because we had just had this exact conversation a few weeks ago. I was expressing my frustration in being unable to find a linguist who could illuminate the connection between language and the facial feedback hypothesis. I had done this post on words that make you joyful early on in the blog’s history, and drawing on Eric Weiner’s “Mol-do-va” (dour) vs. “Ja-mai-ca” (euphoric) comparison I was sure there had to be research on the subject. Peter then told me he had formulated this hypothesis 35 years ago, and had long believed in the power of onomatopoeic words like “glee” to boost your mood.
According to Judson, no research has really been done to confirm or refute these suppositions. But, going on what we do know we can deduce a premise that intuitively feels plausible. If induced smiles have been shown to impact mood (as they have in several studies, most notably this one), and certain sounds induce smiles, then it seems likely that these sounds could influence mood, and by extension, so could the languages that make frequent use of them.
If, through research, we discover this is true, then it adds in an exciting way to the pool of sounds that can be considered intrinsic aesthetics of joy. We already accept the emotional content of musical sounds — that a bright, brassy note from a trumpet is joyous while a drawn-out note on a cello is baleful and contemplative. And certain voices affect us similarly — the high pitch of a child’s voice triggering a different emotional response than the husky bass of an old man. With linguistic sounds, the question is slightly different because it is not about the sound itself, but the motions required to produce the sound — the accident of nature that conflated smiling and speaking functions into the same muscles.
This leads to another interesting question: do you have to actually make the “eeee” sound, or is just hearing it or seeing it pronounced enough? For true facial feedback, you’d actually need to perform the gesture. But I wonder if seeing the action might trigger another brain mechanism — mirror neurons — that might augment the effect of a “happiness language” through social interaction. Mirror neurons are a relatively recent (and extremely exciting) discovery in neuroscience. They fire not just when we perform an action, but also when we see or hear the action being performed by another. Supposedly, these neurons help us learn something new through imitation, whether its a language, an instrument, or another skill. If this is true, then perhaps just sitting across the table from a person making “eeee” sounds over brunch could give your mood a boost, and a “happiness language” could have a contagious quality, infecting people with positivity even during mundane interactions.
What does this have to do with design? Perhaps we could design a language for happiness. I’m not talking about the next Esperanto, but what about a new slang that replaces a few of the most frequently used words with eeee-heavy alternatives? We could adopt the Spanish “sí” for yes, but draw out the vowel so it becomes “seee” and choose another eeee word for no. Start pronouncing “the” as “thee,” as in “theeee end.” Push, pull, stop, go, walk, don’t walk — the verbs of urban living might all have smiling correlates.
What else could design do with smiling sounds? Redesign positive affirmations to use smile-inducing words, so that the act of speaking them reinforces the message. Change the yoga chant from “om” to “eeem.” Use smiling sounds in the naming of new products so that saying the name intrinsically creates a positive connection. Create linguistic-based facial exercises for sufferers of depression. Incorporate verbal keywords into the computing experience, all based around smiling sounds, so that instead of feeling frustration at our computers, we feel…a little less frustration. Design verbally activated switches for the home that react to “eeee” sounds — a happier “Clapper.” These are just top-of-mind thoughts, but the possibilities are intriguing. They may sound silly, but that could just be the point. At least, if you pronounce it “silleeee.”
NYT: A Language of Smiles
Image: Ferdinand Reus, CC
Arthur C. Clarke famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” With all the advances in the technologies becoming readily available to designers these days, it feels to me like I’m constantly surrounded by magic, constantly feeling amazed at what is possible in the world.
The chair above, called the Murakami chair by American designer Rochus Jacob, generates electricity by using a nano-dynamo in the rocker, which it then uses to power its own light. This harnessing of invisible energy feels so impossibly magical that it gives me a little burst of joy.
The fireplace below, designed by Camillo Vanacore, is intended to provide a safe and portable fire for heating purposes. The glass starts out opaque and turns transparent as the flames heat up, which does not seem like a necessary feature, but certainly adds to the magical feeling. But the real magic, for me, is enclosing fire in a glass, capturing its volatility and power in an inert vessel, kind of like the thrill of having a butterfly in a net, without the sad quality of restraining a living thing.
When I look at these designs, I think of Clarke’s words and it strikes me that the meaning of magic is always changing. There was a time when switching on a lightbulb was magic, when firing up a car’s ignition was magic, when seeing an IM ping on your screen was like a flash from the ether — incomprehensibly magic. Now these events are as routine as can be. As technology shifts, and as designers integrate that technology into our lives, the limits of possibility are pushed outward. Magic hovers along that line.
More interesting than the fact that the concept of magic is shifting is how it is shifting. For a long time energy was transferred into work by strictly manual means — every unit of work done had an immediate and understandable impetus. (Similarly, every unit of food consumed or clothing acquired contained for the user a knowable and comprehensible set of inputs and forces that led to its creation.) The magic of technology slowly took away our understanding of these things. It moved sources of energy far away from the work they delivered — from the proximity of the muscles to the distance of the coal-fired electric plant. (Same with food, clothing, and everything else we consume.) There was magic in work that could be done without an immediate proximate cause.
Now, technology is finding magic in immediacy again. It’s the Murakami chair that really drives this point home for me. We’re so used to power coming mysteriously through holes in the wall that we don’t even question it, and yet power that comes from the intuitive rocking motion of our own bodies feels impossibly wonderful. All of these new power sources being explored — the dirt battery or the battery that runs on sugar — have a similarly magical quality, and yet they relate to the things in our world that are the most mundane and elemental: movement, light, earth, fire. Simple pleasures that for all their lack of pretense have a little mystery hiding within.
On Friday I had a post up on Brandchannel about a new initiative by Coca-Cola as part of their Open Happiness campaign. Coke is sending a trio of bloggers around the world for a year to “uncover insights about what makes people happy.” This latest installment in the soft-drink joywashing trend is notable for its intensity and scope — it’s not just an ad campaign, but a constant, year-long push spread over a range of social media platforms.
I think it’s an interesting idea, but it does grate on me to see Coke portray a brand-ambassadorship as a joy-finding mission. These kids are going to be spending barely a day in each country (206 countries in 365 days), barely enough time to exhale, much less derive meaningful understanding (or “insight”) into what makes people happy. But of course this isn’t an ethnographic exploration, it’s an exercise in generating brand stories — warm fuzzy narratives where Coca-Cola is a star character, if not the hero.
More interesting than the supposed happiness insights Coke’s floggers will uncover are the spontaneous interactions outside of Coke’s intentions that will undoubtedly occur along the way — the things that cannot be planned for or factored out when traveling in such unpredictable parts of the world. I don’t think this experience will deliver earth-shaking new insights into emotion, but I think it will illuminate moments of generosity, hope, selflessness, good humor, and compassion that will surprise us. For that reason (and perhaps a little vicarious living), I’ll be watching.
Brandchannel: Coke sends bloggers on an “Open Happiness” world tour
I dare you not to giggle while watching this short film from the People in Order series by Lenka Clayton and John Price. The film presents people in age order from 1 to 100 years old.
The drum device is pure aesthetics of joy — an exuberant bang that runs like a unifying thread through the ages. It also distinguishes them: the four and five year-olds’ delicious pleasure in generating noise is a powerful contrast with the defiant staccato of the their 96 and 100 year-old elders — pithy reverberations that seem to say, “We’re still here!” Each age has its mind, distilled into gesture and sound.
{via Mental Floss}
A few weeks ago we learned that sociologists have created a happiness index using Twitter, and last week we received news that a Facebook app has been developed that serves as a sort of emotional barometer for the socially-networked world.
Emotion aggregation is an interesting evolution from the kind of topic-driven analysis we saw when people first realized they could use the internet to compile sentiment. Google, master of the search, has been publishing a “zeitgeist” of current trends in search. But less than a “spirit of the times” it represents more a mentality of the times — revealing what people are thinking about and pondering in a given period, rather than what we are feeling.
The first (and most engaging) project that I know of to turn this lens on emotion is We Feel Fine by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, which explores people’s emotions through blog posts and other web ephemera. The site allows you to view a wide range of emotions and filter them through criteria like geography, weather, age, and gender. (These images were the result of searching for joy under the program’s “Montage” movement, which overlays people’s joyful images with their feelings.)
This is a much richer look than the latest efforts, which reduce emotion to a linear scale. Happy or not, positive or negative. But the formula is a mystery. On days when millions of people are merely content, is the happiness rating higher or lower than on days when only a few hundred thousand are elated? Emotion does have a clear positive and negative dimension, but it also has dimensions of intensity, duration, and consequences not captured by such a reductive scale. It also, as we’ve seen in the explorations on this blog, has complications of language that make such distinctions even murkier.
It’s very exciting that emotion has become so compelling a topic that its measurement has moved into the mainstream. I also find it intriguing that we’re moving in the direction of being able to take an emotional pulse of the nation, and see the impact of certain events on our collective mood. I don’t think these oversimplified indices tell us much, yet, but hopefully as they develop, they will become powerful tools for sociological study and fodder for more beautiful explorations into the cultural aesthetics of our emotional lives.
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}
Last week I wrote about Microsoft’s new ads using a cute little girl and “happy” imagery to sell Windows 7. And now I’m seeing cuteness everywhere. Bunnies, puppies, cats in dresses — it’s all over the marketing world. It’s interesting to me that it’s both high and low, not just a mass market phenomenon. United Bamboo’s 2010 calendar, for example, features cats in miniature copies of dresses from the line’s latest collection. Given many of these dresses are retailing in the $600-800 range, it’s clear even the premium world thinks it has something to gain from cutevertising.
On the canine side of things, Modcloth, a vintage and indie fashion site, use their mascot Winston to promote their eyewear line to comic effect.
But not all furry things in ads are promoting expensive dresses or fancy shades. These guys just want you to make a “sweet million” with the New York Lottery:
I don’t know how long this trend will sustain itself, but it’s certainly fun while it lasts. What’s next? A Karl Lagerfeld kitten? Piglets selling cosmetics? Birds chirping out a car company jingle? Guinea pigs extolling the virtues of Viagra? Well, that one might in poor taste…
{United Bamboo + Modcloth examples via Refinery 29}
When my studiomate Hayyim brought copies of these incredible 18th century color charts to the studio yesterday, I couldn’t wait to find and share them. They come from a book (which is online in its entirety) on the development of color technologies in Europe in the 18th century. The charts show the emergence of the color wheels most artists and designers are familiar with, and some more novel approaches, such as triangles and pyramids, that reveal a generation of thinkers’ joyful struggle to make sense of our chromatic world in the wake of Newton’s theory of color.
I hope the color brightens up your weekend. See you next week!
xx Ingrid
Addendum: In the original post, I linked but did not cite the source of these wonderful charts. Please see the following reference for more information on this fascinating topic:
Sarah Lowengard, The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe, Gutenberg-e Series (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). www.gutenberg-e.org/lowengard
The lure of the new is a looming constant in industrialized society. Shiny and fresh, novelties constantly beckon: giant glossy plasma screens, sweet-smelling candles, cute kitchen utensils, sexy shoes, and the next must-have gadget of the moment.
Against this relentless parade of newer and better, it’s occasionally nice to take a moment to appreciate the objects and stories of old. Ancient Industries catalogs an array of traditional arts, crafts, and designs into the simple categories “living” and “extinct,” reminding us of treasures we’ve lost and ones that we should appreciate while they still linger.
Perusing the blog is like a joyful history lesson told through beautiful and beloved objects, like those above. Some have cultural meaning, others just have personal meaning for the writers. See more here.
Cluster ballooning is your inner child’s (or inner daredevil’s) fantasy come true. I thought this was something scenic done for effect in movies (see The Red Balloon) — I never imagined people did this in real life.
Oh, but they do, some flying up to 4 miles high (!) in what they call a “something between a sport and a personal eccentricity.” John Ninomiya, a cluster ballooner with over 60 flights under his belt gives a beautiful explication of the sport’s peculiar combination between delight and daring:
Cluster ballooning is also something very beautiful and whimsical – like something from a children’s story, or something from a dream. For me, the tension between those two elements – being carried away with these huge, colorful toys, and at the same time, exercising the appropriate skill not to end up in trouble with the FAA, or possibly injured or killed – that’s what I find so interesting about cluster ballooning.
Cluster ballooning aesthetically is the confluence of so many joyful elements, it’s hard to name them all: round, shiny balloons, gathered together in an abundant mass; the transcendent floating and rising movements that make us look above the horizon; the freedom of flight, unencumbered by heavy craft; the wonder of being above the clouds, leaving the earth and then returning to it; and the absurdity that all this is done by a toy, the very same thing used to decorate a mailbox on a child’s birthday.
It’s an extraordinary feeling when something you never thought existed is revealed to you. As I child, the tug of a helium balloon on my wrist filled me with a fantasy of being carried aloft that was part wish, part fear, but all joy.
Read more about cluster ballooning here, and if you’re feeling brave, check out a tutorial here.
With its latest ads, Microsoft is hoping that some tooth-aching cuteness will make you forget all about the nightmare that was Vista. We might quibble with the logic, but the execution is hard to fault. Kylie’s cute, and I can’t help but giggle when that music comes on and the cat with the marshmallows flashes on the screen with the words, “snappy and responsive.”
A few weeks ago, Virginia tweeted me the question: “What is the relationship between cuteness and joy?” It’s a question I’ve been pondering for a while now. My theory on the subject is still evolving, but in short, it’s based on the fact that we have a visceral, positive reaction to children and childlike things, even those that are not related to us. This is adaptive, of course, because raising children requires sacrifices of a society, not just a parental unit, and so a natural affinity and protective instinct towards children protects the species as a whole. (Chowing down on a few of your neighbor’s hatchlings might be ok when you’re a crocodile with 70 eggs, but with us low-yield humans this kind of behavior is evolutionarily unwise, not to mention socially unpopular.) The assertion that we have an innate positive reaction to children is supported to some extent by research by Morton Kringelbach in his book The Pleasure Center, in which non-parent adults show greater activity in a region of the brain associated with emotion and reward when viewing infant faces than when viewing adult faces.
How does this translate to cuteness? Many cute things are defined by abstractions of neotenized (juvenilized) qualities: big eyes, round cheeks, proportionally large head, and prominent forehead. You would think abstractions would be less effective at evoking our emotions, but actually the reverse may be true, due to something psychologists call the peak-shift effect. Evidently the brain recognizes features made more salient through amplification and distortion even better than the real thing. This is why caricatures are so easy to recognize and so compelling. Cute things are like caricatures of children, distorted by the overemphasis of certain childlike proportions and features. Compare the big-headed Bratz dolls with Barbie, and the features of any stuffed animal with the real thing to see how this abstraction plays out. You can also see abstraction of childhood in cute movements, such as the wobbling of Weebles, which mimic an unsteady toddler. And perhaps we will also find the same to be true for sounds, as children’s voices are higher in pitch than adult voices, and have a less regular cadence.
Maybe Microsoft is hoping that by associating Windows 7 with all this cuteness, there will be a halo effect of protection and tenderness towards the operating system. I’m not sure but it could work, at least in the short term until the emotional impact of daily use takes prominence. Emotions are curiously non-directed, and though they are triggered by one object, the feelings are often transferred or ascribed to another. Microsoft is also shrewdly and not-so-subtly tapping into something else here, which is the cute photo and video forwarding meme (epitomized by sites like Cute Overload) which consumes significant bandwidth on most social media platforms. So it’s not just an innate emotional programing this type of ad appeals to, but also a cultural moment.
At the end of the ad, Microsoft promises “more happy” is to come. Very curious to see what that will look like, and whether Windows 7 actually incorporates any aesthetics of joy into the design of the software itself.
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
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