Rob Walker (of Consumed) had an interesting post on his blog recently evolving the discussion around my Psychology Today post about Unhappy Hipsters and the emotional tenor of modern design. He picks up on my assertion that delight is at root an emotion connected with abundance. In my post, I wrote:

I think that modernism’s restrained quality is fundamentally in tension with the idea of delight. Delight is an emotion of abundance — a celebration of sensation and richness. Delight and joy are primally connected to wellness, and wellness in nature is lush, plump, vibrant, and bountiful.

Walker observes that there’s often something enchanting about abundance in the context of interior design, such as in many of the homes featured in “Sneak Peeks” on the blog Design*Sponge. (The photo above is from a similar type of series: The Selby‘s photos of the homes of creative people. This one is from the home of Sydney gallerist Sarah Cottier, photographer Ashley Barber, and their daughter Ruby.) We value a little abundance in the form of creative clutter because it makes a space invitingly human; collections of real things arranged at non-90 degree angles tell us we’re in a home, rather than a sanitized photo studio or furniture showroom. At the same time, Walker voices a healthy skepticism about the joys of abundance:

I am somewhat cautious about that connection between delight and abundance. Buying into that idea full-on would be emotionally catastrophic — I mean, maybe those “hipsters” are unhappy, but watch an episode of Hoarders and decide for yourself how delightful that abundance seems.

This contrast — between joyful collecting and anxious hoarding — raises some big questions that push the discussion on abundance into an important area. It’s clear there’s a line where things go from joyful plenty to horrifying excess. But where is that line? And why do many of us seem to have so much trouble staying on the healthy side of it?

A clue to our precarious relationship with abundance lies within our own brains, and the neural wiring that underpins our emotional responses. Many emotional reactions are triggered unconsciously by aesthetic (or sensory) elements. Aesthetic elements can take on different meanings through cultural encoding and personal experience, but underneath these layers there is often a kernel of biological inclination, shaped by evolution. One example, which I alluded to in my PT post, is people’s general preference for curves. A primal, unconscious part of our brain (the amygdala) has an intrinsic, background-level fear response to sharp corners, a reaction that makes sense. This emotional response raises our alertness around potentially harmful objects, and by consequence, our chances of survival. The response is purported to have developed over the more than 80,000 generations of the Pleistocene era when humans were evolving into their present form, and were surrounded by an environment where the angular things they might have encountered included cliff edges, tree branches, and predators’ claws — all things around which it’s unwise to be too cavalier.

I believe there’s a similar evolutionary principle going on with abundance, a hardwired predilection etched deep into our brains. My view is that a preference for abundance is a natural residue of generations of evolution in an environment where “too much of a good thing” conferred greater chances of survival. This is why we pig out beyond satiation at buffets and why candy stores make us feel like kids — because these things are aesthetic signifiers of a secure resource stream, something we are predisposed to celebrate and revel in.

At the same time, what was adaptive in the Pleistocene can be maladaptive in the post-industrial age, especially when taken to extremes. For most of us living in the first world, the unpredictable cycles of plenty and privation have been leveled out to such an extent that our greatest want is a lack of ripe mangoes in January. Abundance runs amok; it clogs our arteries and our atmosphere and it accumulates not just in the homes of hoarders, but throughout our environment. It hogs resources, giving some people unimaginable riches while consigning many more to persistent scarcity. This state of affairs is clearly not joyful; it’s rife with guilt, anxiety, and shame. When the population of humans was small relative to the available resources, and resources came and went in uncertain cycles, an insatiable craving for abundance made sense; now, this proclivity can be a truly destructive influence.

But our genes don’t know this. So the hardwired emotional responses that once worked so well to enhance our well-being and survival are now sometimes odds with the same ends. We stuff ourselves, shop-till-we-drop, and hoard because on some level it feels good, even if consciously we know it’s not good for us. Fortunately, we are not slaves to our genetic predispositions. While their influence over our behavior can be profound, it is modulated and controlled by a frontal cortex capable of understanding the dilemmas we face and making necessary tradeoffs. One way we do this is by exercising control over our actions, turning down a second helping or politely declining a tempting sales pitch. Another way is through the design of our environment, and this is where I think an aesthetics of abundance could be quite powerful. Can we design a feeling of abundance without the actual abundance, i.e. without having to use a lot of material, or hoard a whole ton of stuff?

What follows are a few early observations on the idea of aesthetics of abundance, along with some examples. Celebrations such as festivals are a big inspiration in this area, because they often feature abundant, yet temporary, displays, meaning they often need to feel big but be small enough to pack away later. Balloons are often used to create a sense of abundance, even though the actual material they consume is comparatively small. Confetti (though problematic in the cleanup), is another example of a product that creates a sense of abundance with little material. Surface treatments, such as patterns, can also create a feeling of abundance, particularly stripes and polka dots. I love how these stripes on the side of the Barcelona Flower Market seem to swell and move, suggesting the bounty inside:

Designer Paul Smith certainly understands this principle as well:

Another example — these polka dots from the Trash: Any Color You Like project take a feature of city life that normally fades into the background and makes it feel more abundant (an effective way to get people to reflect on the consequences of abundance!).

Variegated color and texture treatments also work to create abundance. Because of the rainbow hues, these chopsticks feel like “more” than they would if they were all one color.

A feeling of abundance can also be created with form and texture, such as with the ruffles that are in shop windows across the country right now for spring.

Abundance is not just about form, but also about context. A teaspoon of sprinkles feels abundant on an ice cream cone; in a giant field, the same teaspoon is insignificant. The cornucopia symbol is apt — abundance needs something to spill out from, a container to press against. It’s easier to make a small home feel abundant than a big one, which is a counterintuitive principle of some comfort to us small-apartment city dwellers. By designing small frames, we can make the things inside feel more bountiful. There’s also a role for design in illustrating the line between abundance and pure excess. That’s part of why the Design*Sponge “Sneak Peeks” are so satisfying. They show managed clutter, abundance in balance. Like a healthy psyche, they are full of emotional experiences, memories, and desires, arranged with some acknowledgment of a rational super-structure. Effusive, but not chaotic.

Like anything taken to extreme, abundance ceases to be joyful once it crosses a certain line. Science doesn’t offer much insight as to where the line is; we just know it when we see it. Love in excess becomes infatuation. Self-confidence becomes narcissism. Neatness becomes compulsion. Too much of any good thing is no good at all. The overstuffed houses of hoarders and the ultra-minimal, bare bones interiors featured in design magazines are two ends of a spectrum of beliefs about homes and happiness. I could just as easily take on the hoarders as the zen-modernists, except for one thing — no one is advocating the hoarder lifestyle. Even the hoarders view their condition with shame. Minimalism, on the other hand, is often preached as a lifestyle nirvana — a blissful, transcendent state achieved by letting go of material things. For some people, this kind of muted emotional landscape is a relief, a break from a high-stress job, information overload, or a plethora of buzzing devices. But for most of us, I’d contend that this kind of environment runs against our emotional nature. We’re made to feel joy in an abundance of color, texture, and sensory stimulation; it’s what makes the neurons fire and the brain grow and develop. Rather than fight it, I’d love to see us use design to create a more sustainable kind of abundance, one that gives us delight without compromising the joy of generations to come.

Images: Barcelona Flower Market via yatzer; Paul Smith Mini via Flickr; trashbags by Adrian Kondratowicz; chopsticks via DWR; ruffles: S/S 2010 shows by Oscar de la Renta, Valentino, and Colette Dinnigan, via Style.com.

Murketing: Clutter, Objects, Joy
Psychology Today / Design and the Mind: Unhappy Hipsters: Does Modern Architecture Make Us Gloomy?

Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home…. Maybe it is a good things for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always later, so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it. For a house that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to the house we were born in, would lead to thoughts—serious, sad thoughts—and not to dreams. It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.

— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

I’ve been dreaming about this house, on the island of Elliðaey in Iceland, since I saw it here. Apparently the house was a gift from the government of Iceland to singer Bjork for raising the country’s global profile. Then I saw this quote by Bachelard and started to feel a little better about the fact that I don’t live in it. I may never get to live in anything quite as remarkable as this, but I find great joy in the houses of my daydreams, and it makes me wonder if sometimes there isn’t as much joy in desiring as possessing.

I’m loving these new offerings from the brilliant duo behind quirky housewares company Alice Supply Co. The new nautical color scheme gives the plungers a kind of Dr. Seussian vibe — like the long tail of the Cat in the Hat. The ping-pong paddles are particularly inspired to me. While they don’t fall under the core mandate of housewares, they’re a natural opportunity to add joy to the mundane through color and pattern. Somehow, dressed in stripes, these paddles seem like they should always have looked that way.

Personally, though, the items I’m most coveting are the hammers. If I had a hammer like these, everything would be a nail!

There’s little joy in the design of light switches, thermostats, and other utilitarian control devices for the home. The best designs of the genre attempt to make them as minimal and unobtrusive as possible.

This “living wall” takes a different tack, incorporating sensors and switches into a wallpaper that you merely need to run your hand across to control. As the wall’s creators say:

Run your hand across this wallpaper to turn on a lamp, play music, or control your toaster. This interactive wallpaper can be programmed to monitor its environment and control other electronic devices, serving as a beautiful and unobtrusive way to enrich environments with computation. The wallpaper is flat, constructed entirely from paper and paint and can be paired with our paper computing kit whose pieces serve as sensors, lamps, network interfaces, and interactive decorations.

As technology like this becomes increasingly available, some exciting possibilities could open up for designers. Unlike a thermostat that only senses temperature in one part of the house, leaving rooms unevenly heated, a wallpaper with diffused thermosensing could ensure more even (and efficient) heating and cooling. Light sensors could also help to adjust light, so that artificial lights automatically increase as sunlight wanes. Running your hands across the wall to turn on the light just feels more magical, the resultant actions wondrously inexplicable.

The best part is that the living wall is made using simple and inexpensive technologies like conductive and magnetic paint applied to regular paper. So there’s a chance that even the non-millionaires among us could be seeing these in our homes in several years’ time.

More from the high-low tech project at MIT’s Media Lab.

{via PSFK}

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.

{via PSFK: chair and fire}

Defying the laws of gravity, the Boskke sky planter makes ordinary houseplants into magical specimens. Oddly joyful!

{via Oh Joy!}

I’ve been meaning to do a post on joyful blankets for awhile, but today the gray, rainy weather really has me craving coziness. So put away the snuggie and wrap yourself up in something with a little more style and texture. Clockwise from top left: Uzbek suzanis, each one of a kind from L’Aviva Home; Saddle blankets from Roxtons; Ladak recycled moving blankets, embellished with ribbon and lace, available at Reform School; Vintage striped Moroccan blankets; Hand-crocheted Granny Square throw by Sandra Juto; Vintage Bolivian frasadas from Twine.

Enjoy your weekend. Stay warm and happy!

xx Ingrid

This house is a great example of the way pops of color on a white or neutral canvas create an aesthetic sense of joy. Writer Douglas Coupland’s polychrome collections could look like a circus in a house with a lot of color. Showcasing them against a mostly white or otherwise muted background creates moments of intense color with enough room to breathe.

In this way, design should mimic emotion. You don’t want to be feeling intense joy all the time — it would be exhausting, and it wouldn’t be possible to appreciate it. As one wave of joy recedes, you want a little bit of stillness, the rest that allows you to rediscover the joy and feel it all over again. This principle echoes the Japanese aesthetic idea of ma, the white space that is essential to any composition or design. Ma can be spatial or temporal, visual or textural, and in all cases results in an emotional feeling that allows a design to achieve the right level of poignancy.

Another joyful aspect is the unexpected nature and placement of these collections. Mundane spools of thread are elevated to high art by their gridded placement on a white wall. Dice, when laid out above an entryway, become a surprising lintel. Taken out of their usual context, these objects become fodder for unanticipated moments of delight.

NYT: The House Next Door, via Ouno

This joyful roof, tweeted by @design_sponge and found on MandR, sent me off in search of others. My mind first went to the marvelous glazed tiled roofs in Burgundy, such as the one in the upper left below, from the Hospices de Beaune. It looks to me a like a carpet laid out. Then I remembered China, and the amazing color and texture of many palace roofs, like the large image in the middle. A Flickr search uncovered many more joyful roofs, with wonderfully textured tiles, light-capturing glass, wavy forms, and the charming patina of old age. And how could I forget the exuberant sails of the Jorn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House.

A roof is often a forgotten element of home design. I grew up in a home that had those dull gray-black shingles, the kind that felt like sandpaper while I was climbing it (to my father’s chagrin). But that common oversight makes it all the more surprising and delightful when you come across a special one.

Images left to right and top to bottom: Polar lights, miuenski, Guy Hunkin, ruthness, Manuel Barroso Parejo,  ~morsus~, anneinparis16, Alex E. Proimos.

This rug by designer Angela Adams is joyful, but not exactly cheap. ($18,000? I can hear my grandfather asking, “Does it fly?”) Alas, we might have to content ourselves instead with some stationery or a nice tote.

via The Moment

ps: I just noticed this is my 100th post! A small but happy milestone to celebrate…

I’m glad someone’s trying to bring some joy to the cord problem, because that consistently ranks as one of the least delightful places in my home. It reminds me of Christoph Niemann’s wonderful “My Life With Cables” illustrated essay on his Abstract City blog.

My desk is even worse than this! So I like where Dotz is going with the concept — these cord identifiers remind me of hard candies! — but I think they’re indulging in a little oversimplification for the purpose of a clean photograph. How many of your cords are white with neat small ends like that? Most of mine are some shade of black or gray and have a giant fatso converter covering three outlets, necessitating daisy-chained power strips that make the whole operation look a little sub-code. Dotz’s setup looks joyful and colorful when you simplify the backdrop, but I’d like to see a similarly sweet-looking problem solver for the way cords really look.

via @vpostrel

This short snippet of conversation (2:34 mins — short and worth a watch) with architect Lars Spuybroek reverses the conventional paradigm around how we perceive space. Typically we think of space as static and ourselves as dynamic beings that move through it. But Spuybroek asserts that our sense of space is shaped by emotion, and is therefore much more fluid than we imagine.

When you’re happy, so to speak, or when you’re exhilirated your whole sense of space is totally different than when you’re moody or neutral or whatever. So there’s this whole idea of space being a byproduct of feeling instead of the other way around. That there is space and you just feel in there, no no, it’s feeling itself that actually creates space.

I think this is something we can all intuitvely relate to, and it has wonderful implications for design. If emotion can open up space, then inducing positive emotion can completely alter the way people experience a space. Aesthetics of joy, properly applied, could create a sense of expansion that could transform existing structures into spaces that feel good to inhabit. And as Spuybroek suggests, the aesthetics of joy that transform a space could even be portable, emanating from the people who occupy it.

Interview recorded by the Sputnik Observatory

I love the contrast between these two mobiles, illustrating different aesthetics of joy. The one on the left is celebratory — vibrant and effusive, a cloud of color. The one on the right layers two aesthetics in one: lightness and surprise — the floating, elevated feeling created by the spacing in the pure white linear structure, coupled with the whimsical burst of texture at the bottom.

And yet there are also commonalities: curvilinear, symmetrical forms, based at root in the circle; harmony and balance inherent in the idea of mobile; light, dancing movements; and of course, intense bursts of color. It continues to amaze me, as I work through this project, how consistent and yet how diverse the elements are that give rise to the aesthetics of joy.

Mobiles by Frazier & Wing
Via Daily Candy

These quirky chairs subtly yet irreverently disrupt the conventions around how chairs should be, all alike in a matching set. Their sweet variations are like the differences in family members — same DNA, different expression.

I also like this as an illustration of how a design can exemplify aesthetics of joy without most of the conventional elements: color, curvilinearity, energetic gestures, etc. There is not just one aesthetic of joy, but many different ones, all held together by a certain spirit that transcends barriers and expectations, and a deep, rediscoverable pleasure.

Family Chairs by Lina Nordqvist, available this week at MoMA

NYT: “Turning the Table on Chairs”

This calendar works like magic, drawing just the right amount of ink each day to fill out the date. Each month is colored to fit the seasons.

Ink Calendar by Oscar Diaz via New York Magazine

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.

Here’s an idea that’s long overdue. Joyful cleaning products! A few years ago, Method and Mrs. Meyers made the consumable side of cleaning a lot more joyful with bright scents and clean packaging. Now the Alice Supply Co. brings the aesthetics of joy to bear on the durables: buckets, plungers, brooms, toolboxes.

That garden hose in particular makes me salivate for place in the country with some big Martha Stewart-y flower beds. Are brightly colored cleaning supplies going to get the toilet any cleaner? No. But they might just make you feel a little less like Cinderella while you’re scrubbing. . .

Via Daily Candy

Virginia Postrel sent me these joyful pops of color from Apartment Therapy this morning. Scroll down for more. I particularly love this one, especially the rubber duck and the Pinocchio felted rug by Hay. This would be so joyful in a neutral-toned apartment, under a favorite reading chair…