aesthetics of joy

It doesn’t get more prosaic than the clothesline. Once a household staple, now replaced in most of the US with washer/dryer units, they’re a rare sight for many Americans. Yet go abroad and they’re still ubiquitous, used either by necessity or by desire, for a more eco-friendly life or the wonderful feeling of clothes dried in the sunshine.

I’ve always thought that clotheslines are like impromptu garlands. Though they are explicitly functional objects, as are the items that hang on them, they imbue a space with a celebratory feeling. They add color and draw the eye upwards. This is especially true in cities, where clotheslines festoon alleyways, swooping from window to window up several stories.

On clotheslines, the clothes themselves become more than just pants or t-shirts; unified by color and drape, they are more like flags of different shapes. This is a great reminder of how grouping things together changes how we perceive them. And you can see some ideas of curation in the launderer, making choices about color adjacencies, patterns, and scale. In effect, this person, the unseen clothes-washer, is a designer of public space, changing how neighbors and tourists experience the buildings, streets, and passageways between them.

I spotted these particular clothesline photos in the Instagram feed of my friend Sheena Matheiken; she has a wonderful, joyful eye and I had to share them with you. Clotheslines seem emblematic of the idea that joy is in your prism, in how you choose to see the world. You could see them as intrusions in the landscape, objects of toil or clutter. Or you can relish their quotidian beauty, the way the light shines through them, and the charming absurdity of seeing a stranger’s underwear fluttering in the open breeze. Anaïs Nin famously said, “We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are.”

I think I see so much joy in the world because I choose to see it that way. Some people think that if you’re looking so much for joy, you’ll have high expectations that are often disappointed. But I don’t believe it works that way. Being joyful by nature, and by intention, I find it jumps out at me. I don’t actually have to look very hard; it finds me.

What are your “clotheslines?” What are your favorite examples of everyday things that become joyful when you really look at them?

Images: Sheena Matheiken

I love the rich, bright gradients on these packages from Bermellón, a Mexican confectionary shop. (Not to mention the bright colors of the sweets themselves.) The colors are as functional as they are eye-catching, reflecting the intense spicy and sour flavors with which Bermellón infuses its sweets.

In this way, the packaging essentially replicates the vibrant skins of fruits, which advertise their sweet, flavorful contents. Research suggests our color vision evolved to find those ripe fruits, so it’s no surprise we feel delight when our food comes wrapped in bright colors. More than just a pretty wrapper, these boxes tap into some of the most primal associations we have with nourishment: they feed the eyes, and also the soul.

Also, how great is the pop of yellow on the inside of the bag? A little flash that proclaims: “good stuff in here!”

Images: Anagrama, via Designboom

Last year on the 4th of July, I gathered with a horde of others on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade to try to catch a glimpse of the Hudson River fireworks display. It was a crowd united by optimism. We had the whole city of Manhattan between us and the lights, as imposing fence as could exist, but still we were all there, hopeful and wanting. So when the first booms sounded, and a few reflected glimmers sneaked through the slices of sky between buildings, there were cheers and hollers. Like a bunch of vagabonds peering into a theater from the rafters, we saw only halos and flecks, but it didn’t matter because we part of it. Celebration is so abundant, even its detritus is joyful. You can bask in its leftovers for weeks.

These amazing vintage fireworks labels (courtesy of British pyrotechnics enthusiast and historian Steven Johnson and his Firework Heritage Museum) give off no light or noise, but they have a similar kind of joyful residue. The various stars and sunbursts, flickers and flames, twinkles and sparks: they’re so evocative, you can almost hear the pops, hisses, and crackles, building a kind of aesthetic anticipation. You can’t wait to strike a match and see what happens.

And the names! One year my mother, Nana, and I all watched the fireworks together, coming up with names for all the different effects. But Spangled Star Bomb? Brock’s Twinkler? Radium Dazzler? Those old firework-makers had a poetic flair and a joyful spirit that has us completely beat. (Though I think “Wonder Banger” might have shifted meaning a bit since then.)

I’m off to try to see the fireworks again, this time from the slightly better vantage point of some friends’ rooftop. If I see any, you’ll find them on Instagram. I hope you’re seeing fireworks somewhere tonight too. But if not, be like the clever Sean Ohlenkamp and make some of your own. Have a Flambo Jambo 4th of July!

This morning I read with delight about Brooklyn-based artist Joseph Herscher, who is reviving the joy of the Rube Goldberg machine, a device “that accomplishes a simple task in the most complicated way possible.” Using objects such as rolling balls, burning fuses, watering cans, ladles, fly swatters, and even a pet guinea pig, Herscher creates sprawling kinetic sculptures that perform mundane actions such as fixing a cocktail or turning the page of a book. The video above shows one of his simpler machines, La Macchina Botanica, performed at the Venice Biennale and constructed with the help of forty local children. The video on the New York Times site has a broader overview of his work, as well as a new piece called Page Turner, and is well worth a look.

Listen to the crowd as La Macchina Botanica unfolds; their responses offer an illustration of the workings of joy. Around :48, as the long mallet moves so slowly it almost seems stuck, there’s an audible swell of anticipation, followed by a cheer of release as the ball eventually starts rolling again. (Is it possible not to smile along with this moment?) The anticipation breaks the rhythm and creates a point of tension, which provides an opportunity to offer relief. When a piece moves unexpectedly, there are similar exclamations of surprise and enchantment. The unpredictability of the device disrupts our expectations in a clever, pleasurable way. And at the end, when the piece achieves its objective, there is collective celebration, with an outpouring of applause and acclaim. It’s a moment of completion, of joyful narrative resolution. After all, what the device is really doing is imposing a storyline onto a thoughtless act. The task becomes relatively unimportant, as we know it can be accomplished by other means. What is important is completing the story, watching the machine glide smoothly over all the hairy, implausible connections with balletic ease, and resolving the tension introduced by the complexity of the stage set.

At its core, the Rube Goldberg machine is playful, and this is the essence of its allure; it is a task that has been turned into a game. This playful tendency sits in tension with the basic premise of a machine, which Herscher comments on in the Times video: ”Usually machines are things you have to make your life easier, to do things more efficiently.” And efficiency is rarely a route to joy. Play has no role in a world governed by efficiency, because by definition play is not an efficient act. An apparently purposeless activity that is enjoyed for its own sake, play is inimical to the virtues of efficiency: it is slow, wasteful, and distracting. So a playful machine is an inherent absurdity, but as playful creatures living in an increasingly mechanistic world, we finding it intensely compelling. For this reason, the more mundane the task and the more extravagantly silly the process of achieving it, the better the machine. It seems that Herscher’s work is evolving in that direction; it will be interesting to see what he does next.

NYT: Who Says Machines Must Be Useful?

As you know I’m fascinated by language and color, and the dialogue between the two. And I’m captivated by tools, extenders of human capability that give myriad forms to the efforts of our hands. As a tool of communication, this is perhaps inefficient. But as a tool of expression, it is powerful. The typewriter is a piece by artist Tyree Callahan.

What I love most is how Callahan maintained the convention of case in the typewriter keys. You can see how shifting would affect the color, in most cases increasing the intensity, a nice if imperfect analogue for the upper case. Callahan has entered the piece for a West prize. You can learn how to vote for it here.

And along a similar vein (but with a completely different tone), there’s this cocktail typewriter, which translates from language to color to flavor. (A fun, but potentially dangerous tool in the wrong hands!)

{via Colossal}

Stick bombs. Did you know such a thing existed? This is totally something I would’ve been building as a kid (along with those extremely satisfying domino chains) had I known it were possible. I put a lot of stock in this kind of play: mundane objects elevated by creativity. It’s through these kinds of hands-on explorations that we learn the forces that govern the world, both their limits and their potential.

The best part is the kid’s tutorial about how to make a stick bomb. I especially love the distinction between a “baby cobra weave” and “the other kind of weave.” Send it along to all the kids in your life with a pack of jumbo* popsicle sticks, and get cracking!

*Don’t forget to get the jumbo kind, otherwise it will be really really really really really really hard!

Omhu is a Danish company with a mission to support people’s changing needs throughout life with design. The name means “with great care” in Danish, and that’s evident in the selections, from elegant hot water bottles to eyeglass cases to their signature walking sticks – everything is selected to make life with impairments a little more beautiful. They write:

We started Omhu after searching in vain for well-designed products for relatives and friends who needed help with simple tasks such as walking, bathing, or reaching overhead… Omhu celebrates good design because it’s life-enhancing, and it’s fun. By creating more exciting choices of things that help, we hope we can also help change the way people feel about aging and ability. Because everyone’s getting older – even you!

They also say that “beauty heals,” which I think is an important idea. When you think about being diagnosed with a long-term illness, it’s rarely the aesthetics you think about. But suddenly being dependent on cold metal walkers, hospital beds, and other disability aids usually has a dampening effect on the mood, and I think we could improve quality of live significantly with more thoughtful consideration of the emotions in design. Imagine how unenthusiastic people would be about wearing eyeglasses if they were styled like the prosthetics they are, rather than fashion accessories. Color, texture, and form can quietly console us about our condition, as well as inspire us to take better care of ourselves.

The walking sticks, which I first wrote about in a column for Core77, are now on sale for $112 (regularly $149) at Fab, a new online flash sale site for design. The sale ends in two days, so if this is something you’re considering, don’t wait!

Seems it is a week for thinking about time. Perhaps it’s the heat, which slows the afternoons to a thickness, reminding us of the elasticity of hours. Or perhaps the long days of summer leave us more light to read and think. Whatever the reason, in the past few days for me have brought a confluence of aesthetics of time.

This visualization is a fitting place to start. A piece by the designer Nicolas Troncoso, Colordar represents the average temperature of Helsinki over the course of 2010 by color. There is something satisfying and joyful about seeing the year represented this way, the intensity of the summer and winter tempered by the mildness of the transitional seasons. Of course there is a natural relationship between temperature and color, evident in the way we refer to colors as cool and warm, that makes this visualization feel perfectly natural. It is another type of color language, akin to the ones I have written about in the past, distilling the ambience of time. It might be fun to do this with other geographies (equatorial, desert, polar) as well, nested as concentric circles for comparison, to see space, temperature, and time all at once.

If color here is an output of our experience of time, in other ways color serves as an input, a language that communicates time to our body and brain. We know that the color of light changes through the course of the day, the short-wave bluish rays of the early hours giving way to the longer wavelength light that gives the sunset its rosy hue. But what research now suggests (as reported in a recent article in the NYT) is that these color signals are the basis for our body’s regulation of Circadian rhythms. In other words, our eyes tell time by color.

As the color-receiving cone cells in our eyes absorb different wavelengths of light, they regulate the production of melatonin, a light-sensitive hormone that controls our alertness. (Melatonin is often indicated as a natural remedy for jet lag.) We’ve long known that melatonin levels vary based on exposure to light, but recent research shows that the color of the light makes a dramatic difference. In one study at the University of Basel in Switzerland, thirteen men were asked to sit in front of a computer in the evenings before bed. Both groups of participants sat for five hours in front of a computer screen. But one group looked an old-style fluorescent monitor emitting a range of colors of light from the visible spectrum, while the other group looked at an LED-backed monitor that emitted twice as much blue light. For the blue-light group, melatonin levels took longer to rise, and stayed lower throughout the evening. Other studies have found similar results, one indicating that men exposed to bluer light had melatonin levels 40 percent lower than those exposed to incandescent light.

These discoveries force us to question the consequences of our increasingly illuminated world. As we replace our old CRTs and incandescent bulbs with more efficient light sources, we’re also inadvertently increasing our exposure to the bluer light these devices emit. And as we introduce more and more screens to our world, we add still more blue light to our days. (Through this lens, reading by the cozy glow of an iPad or Kindle is very unlike reading a book with a bedside lamp.) If the world communicates time by its color, our devices speak to our bodies in tongues.

This may be alarming news, but there’s also a positive story here. Blue light increases alertness, and has been shown to have effects on cognition and alertness. One study showed that elderly nursing home residents exposed to just 30 minutes of blue light showed improvement in cognitive abilities in just four weeks. This could be useful from a design perspective, for everything from helping shift workers manage their schedules to promoting alertness for those operating vehicles or machinery (a fact called out to me by Dr. Charles Spence, the director of the Crossmodal Research Lab at Oxford University). Even for sleep-deprived office workers, better lighting could mean more energy and a break from the need for caffeine. One of the researchers behind these studies, neurologist George Brainard, hopes that designers will rise to the challenge and get to work on creating screens and lights that adjust their wavelengths to reinforcing our natural rhythms.

In the end, I come back to the mechanism itself, and the latent poetry of it. Light is merely energy, and blue light, with its short waves, is high-energy luminance. Vibrating and alive, these rays excite the molecules of pigment in our retinas, a revelie that calls our cells to the attention of the day. There’s a beauty in this energetic language, one that reminds us that blue has an inherent joy. Though typically perceived to be a calming color, blue is revealed by these studies to have an intensity we don’t often give it credit for. The brilliant sky of a clear day moves us with a force that speaks directly to the chemistry of our blood. We are helpless to resist. And why would we want to? It’s a primal kind of delight, and we are made for it.

{via @brainpicker and @vaughanbell}

It’s been a hot summer (today was no exception) and since the first taste of this ebbing-and-flowing heat wave, I’ve been thinking about swimming pools. There is no greater luxury or greater joy in a midsummer city than a swimming pool, a cool watery oasis in a desert of hot reeking concrete. Last summer there was the frenzy of the Gowanus dumpster pools, now converted into a public attraction by the Bloomberg administration for Summer Streets. Before that, the most talked-about New York pool was the floating pool lady, a barge converted to a pool by the city that debuted in 2007 in Brooklyn, and that docks in a different borough each summer. I haven’t managed to swim in either, but this summer I’ve been the benefactor of the generosity of a friend with a private pool, a backyard gem in the East Village that is all the more tantalizing for its secrecy.

After a couple of years living in Sydney, it’s hard to be without a pool. There, private pools are rare, but the public ones are ubiquitous and stunning. There’s the Andrew Boy Charleton pool, a 50m beauty that makes you feel like you’re literally swimming in the harbor. There’s also the North Sydney pool, right in the shadow of the Harbor Bridge. And there are the ocean pools, so beloved by Australians that they have their own culture, a culture robust enough to be the subject of a documentary: Sea Pool: A Life in the Ocean, teased in the video above. Bondi Icebergs, shown in the teaser, is particularly amazing; fed by crashing waves, it is briny and bracing all year round. Membership requires that you swim every weekend, regardless of the weather. Do that for five years, and you’re a member for life. It is the ultimate pool-lover’s pool club.

A frigid pool on a hot day is a delight; on a cold day, it is a trial. This may be an illustration of the difference between joy and happiness. Joy is immediate, momentary. It reacts to stimuli that accompanied the satisfaction of needs over the many generations of our evolution. A hot body in a cold pool is one step closer to homeostasis, and the aesthetics of the swimming pool (cool, shimmering blueness) are all designed to advertise that temperature-regulating function. Hot and cold in tension, moving towards balance: there is a certain kind of harmony there. A cold body in a cold pool, on the other hand, stands in defiance of emotional logic. The winter swimmer must see something beyond the immediate, because the proximate experience is discomfort, possibly even pain. Past the trial must be something: the satisfaction of completing a goal, the strength of physicality inured, the delight of an invitation to a company of like minds. It’s the pre-frontal cortex that envisions and plans this, that looks past disharmony towards a greater future pleasure. Joy, arising unconsciously from the limbic brain, revels in a more immediate gratification.

Along with the harmony of the pool, there is also freedom. Buoyant, liberated from gravity, we float in effortless space. We glide on the edge of another world, one in which the usual rules of movement are relaxed and transformed. I’m reminded of a moment in the John Cheever story The Swimmer:

To be embraced and sustained by the light green water was less a pleasure, it seemed, than the resumption of a natural condition, and he would have liked to swim without trunks, but this was not possible, considering his project.*

The waterborne lightness of swimming does feel natural, even in the truly unnatural setting of the swimming pool. And it feels freeing, even though the pool is a fixed, bounded area. The pool becomes an oasis, a space where the rules, both natural and cultural, are different. Not only are we free to move differently, but we are free to act differently: We do spontaneous headstands, splash around in silly patterns, lounge indolently. We are a bit more childlike, and perhaps more like our real selves. Childlike pleasure is often a breadcrumb on the route to joy, and the child’s love of the swimming pool is a clue to a delight buried within most of us.

Do we grow out of the joy of the pool? Ellen Meloy writes in her ode to the pool, a chapter called “Swimming the Mojave” from her memoir, The Anthropology of Turquoise:

The human body needs the embrace of water. The fifties boom in California swimming pools, and the attachment of pools to the culture of a mobilized America, announced affluence, comfort, and good climate, and it made the embrace available in controlled circumstances: big recreational bathtubs gone outdoors, with no worry about what might lurk in their depths. For everyone but children, for whom it is a baptism of sheer joy, a pool holds more chlorine than wonder.

It’s true that a pool can be fake, and chemical, and wasteful. In a backyard, it can be mundane. In a desert, absurd. But I still think there’s always a glimmer of joy in the swimming pool, regardless of your age. It’s in the faces and movements of those in the video above—a visceral pleasure, a reawakening of body, a liberation of spirit. A pool may be an artificial experience, but the joy is all real.

*The Swimmer tells the story of a man who decides to swim home from a party, dipping into all the pools along the way.

Sea Pool: A Life in the Ocean, by Jason Wingrove
More teasers here and here

{Thanks, Sarah, for the link to the video above, and the swims!}

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

via Let’s Color