aesthetics of joy

A couple of days ago my friend and IDEO colleague Erika shared some sad news. A friend of hers who had been diagnosed with a brain tumor several years ago is now facing his last weeks. He is younger than me.

In these terrible moments, I think most of us have a comforting instinct: to make something. And designers especially. For the creative act is both a gift to the person leaving this world — a tangible expression of love — and an affirmation of life for the living. We exist to create: we build tools and buildings and cities, we make art and food and music, we make friendships and of course, we make families, extending ourselves through the lives we make possible. Creating something, anything, is how we grab ahold of the time between birth and death, and make it meaningful.

When Erika said she and her friends were making a thousand cranes for Paulo, and she coordinated an origami session at the studio yesterday, it felt bittersweet to be able to join in. A thousand origami cranes are a Japanese good luck tradition. It is a joyful tradition, one of vibrance and abundance — to receive a thousand cranes, carefully folded by hand, how could you not feel loved? I was moved by how joyful even just our small contribution of cranes looks together, and how unifying the experience was of folding them, knowing that others were folding for the same purpose, with the same prayers for someone who is a stranger to many of us, but very dear to someone we care about.

The late Irish philosopher John O’Donohue once described being with a friend in her last moments, a kind woman who was deeply loved by friends and family. He wrote:

It showed me that if you live in this world with kindness, if you do not add to other people’s burdens, but if you try to serve love, when the time comes for you to make the journey, you will receive a serenity, peace, and a welcoming freedom that will enable you to go to the other world with great elegance, grace, and acceptance.

Thank you, E, for letting us be part of your kindness to your friend. I hope they help Paulo, his friends, and family find some small moment of joy in the sadness.

Here’s something subtle, yet charming, in honor of today’s snowy day. Artist Toshihiko Shibuya adds color to snow through reflection. By painting metal disks and plates with bright colors, he creates a vibrant palette in the snow. I love the magic of this, letting the elements (in this case, snow) reveal a hidden hue. It’s very Japanese, to work with the landscape, to patiently tease out color from the interactions between forces rather than painting it thick across the top.

I was enchanted by the same color reflections when doing space analysis in design school. I used to spend untold hours hanging colored planes in boxes made of foam core so that the light would tinge just so. Based on this fascination, I designed one of the pieces for my thesis using the same idea. I don’t often share my work on this site, but this seems relevant. I designed the stools below to almost disappear when looked at head on. Then when stacked, they reveal their hidden color.

The intent of my thesis was to illustrate different essential ideas of Aesthetics of Joy in simple furniture forms. I designed 10 pieces. If you like these, maybe I’ll post more… I miss furniture design. I love creating utilitarian things that brighten up everyday life. One day, when I finish this book, I’ll get back to it. (And hopefully that will be sooner, rather than later!)

Images: Toshihiko Shibuya’s work courtesy of Designboom; mine are my own

Here’s a little postcard from my Miami writing retreat, where I’m working on chapter two of the book, slowly but surely. I have an endless supply of notecards, a bottomless cup of tea, a quirky dog for company, and family to distract me when I’m ready to take a break. It’s a good way to work.

While looking up a reference yesterday in Diane Ackerman’s breathtaking A Natural History of the Senses, I came across a passage that stopped me in my tracks, and I wanted to share it with you.

When you consider something like death, after which (there being no news flash to the contrary) we may well go out like a candle flame, then it probably doesn’t matter if we try too hard, are awkward sometimes, care for one another too deeply, are excessively curious about nature, are too open to experience, enjoy a nonstop expense of the senses in an effort to know life intimately and lovingly. It probably doesn’t matter if, while trying to be modest and eager watchers of life’s many spectacles, we sometimes look clumsy or get dirty or ask stupid questions or reveal our ignorance or say the wrong thing or light up with wonder like the children we are. It probably doesn’t matter if a passerby sees us dipping a finger into the moist pouches of dozens of lady’s slippers to find out what bugs tend to fall into them, and thinks us a bit eccentric. Or a neighbor, fetching her mail, sees us standing in the cold with our own letters in one hand and a seismically red autumn leaf in the other, its color hitting our senses like a blow from a stun gun, as we stand with a huge grin, too paralyzed by the intricately veined gaudiness of the leaf to move.

This is the wonderfully uncool essence of joy for me: trying too hard and caring too deeply. At the end of the day, you regret the things you didn’t do more than the ones you did.

Have a joyful, creative weekend. I hope you’re out with people you love, or getting lost in something that inspires you. Be clumsy, get dirty, grin big. What else are you here for?

Xx ingrid

Two years ago today I started this blog as a way of launching this little idea I had out into the world and seeing if it could be real. I feel as if I set one of those little toy boats into the circular pool in Central Park, only to find it’s become a real boat on a broad, blue ocean.

In the past two years, some of my greatest joys have come through this forum. From your thoughtful emails and comments to your inspiring tips and links, I find myself bowled over daily by the curiosity and generosity with which you engage with me in this adventure. I’m humbled and grateful that you share your time and insight with me on how you see the potential for more joy to be designed into the world. If only you knew how much you’ve challenged, encouraged, and motivated me over the past two years, as I’ve undertaken this daunting task of trying to understand and codify the aesthetics of joy.

In truth, this blog started as a way to catalog inspiration and think out loud while I worked on my book. It’s become so much more than that. The book is still not done, but when it is it will be immeasurably richer for the dialogue here. But more than that, I’ve seen the purpose of the blog in its own right, and it has given me ideas for other projects – exhibits, designs, essays – that I hope will also come to fruition.

Thank you for a wonderful two years, and here’s hoping for more joy in the years to come!

Xx Ingrid

Image: paper lanterns by and available at uguisu

For those who may not have seen via twitter, I’m very excited to announce a new collaboration with Core77 — I’ll be writing a monthly column on the site, starting right now! My first piece is actually more about design and psychology more broadly, but it relates to the unconscious effects of aesthetics that I often write about here on the site. Here’s an excerpt:

If you want to convince someone about something, you’d better give them a soft seat.

This is one design implication coming out of a surprising new set of studies that examines the relationship between our sense of touch and our attitudes and decisions. The studies looked at the unconscious associations between aesthetic elements such as texture, hardness, and weight, and found that by exposing subjects to these elements, researchers could elicit different responses to the same social questions and tests.

For example, study participants who sat in a soft seat and were asked to negotiate with a car dealer made far more generous second offers than those who sat in hard seats. The hard seats literally made them more rigid. Similarly, when volunteers were asked to read and evaluate a story about an interaction between a supervisor and an employee, the ones in the hard wooden chairs viewed the boss as stricter and more rigid than the ones who sat in soft, cushioned chairs. In another experiment, participants who had just put together a puzzle with pieces coated in rough sandpaper were more likely to find a story of an ambiguous social interaction to be difficult and adversarial than those who had put together a puzzle made of smooth, varnished pieces. Harsh textures evidently prime us to think harshly. Other related studies have shown correlations between temperature and social attitudes (proving the intrinsic truth behind the phrases “warm fuzzies” and “cold pricklies”), between weight and perceived seriousness, and between “clean smells” and moral behavior.

Click here to head over to Core77 to keep reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts, and know about other topics you might like to see covered in this new forum. Thanks for reading!

A small note of shameless self-promotion: my Animo kid’s chair is being exhibited at imm Cologne, which runs today through the 24th. The exhibit is part of a collaboration between Pratt and Germany’s Folkwang academy called “Take a Seat.” You can see some of my co-exhibitors here. I’m very excited to have my work showing at this amazing international venue and with such talented designers!

The chair was inspired by watching the way children move: joyfully, experimentally, and totally unselfconsciously. Intended for experimental learning environments such as museums, it supports these healthy movements through a unique system of energy absorption. Based on the tensile balance of a highly elastic material (bungee cords) and an inelastic one (nylon panels), it translates a child’s energy into a dynamic visual display. More info about the chair, including models that show how the mechanism was developed, is here.

Also, I just want to give a public “thank you!” to the amazing John Medley, who fixed the prototype after the tension from the bungee cords bent it out of shape — John definitely saved the day.

Well, I’m back! And I must say, I have really missed my daily posts. On Friday, I presented the masters thesis portion of Aesthetics of Joy — the theory as well as ten furniture concepts and a designer’s toolkit for creating joy. Over the coming weeks I want to share some of these ideas, as well as revel in some of the holiday joy I’ve missed while I’ve been in thesis isolation.

This video shows one of my furniture concepts. It’s a stool based on the idea of a firefly lantern. I could imagine a bunch of these scattered around a garden restaurant or bar, gently lighting up the night. The lights are LEDs driven by an Arduino board, programmed to pulse randomly using a sine wave function. Getting the lights to look like fireflies was no mean feat, and required a lot of fine tuning of the code. Fortunately, my electronics professor Liubo Borissov was extremely generous with his time in helping me get this going.

The inspiration for the stool is the magic aesthetic, which has to do with joy from things that seem uncanny, implausible, or impossible. Magic is about the apparent defiance of ordinary laws of nature, and for me bioluminescence has always been a conduit to that strange and wonderful magic.

Wonderful project by Rachel Berger. Every day for 100 days she chose a color swatch at random from a bag, and wrote a short piece (like a prose haiku) inspired by it. I love how it exposes all the random connections that color and language form in our tangled brains. There are the aesthetics of joy in the world, but then there are also the aesthetics of joy inside us — embedded in the network in our neurons, the experiences of our cells, the sensations still living on our fingertips, and the pattern of thrills that has shaken our bones. Sometimes it can be hard to access them, but then a chance encounter with a color, aroma, or evocative sound can bring them right back to the surface of the now.

{via DesignObserver}

I’m taking a holiday from the blog this long weekend to focus on last-minute details for the thesis. Happy Thanksgiving, and see you Monday!

xx Ingrid

The other night I was at Green Depot for the Inhabitat NYC launch and I couldn’t resist the gorgeous wall of paint swatches. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m crazy about color and those walls of color chips have an almost hypnotic effect on me. I couldn’t resist taking a strip of bright yellow with me to think about what I’d paint with it. Well lo and behold the next day I’m on the subway and I reach for Alice in Wonderland (which I’m rereading for something like the 25th time) and the yellow strip has slipped itself into the pages just like a bookmark. Happy accident!

Ok, I know this isn’t even really a project, but you could make it one if you felt so inclined, by adding a ribbon or other decoration at the top, or pasting two back-to-back for a double-sided version. Either way, it’s nice joyful little thing you can make with very little effort at all, and for free, to boot.

Wonderful project idea from Sandra Juto. A surprise ball containing little treasures hidden by wrapping in crepe paper. You can buy them from Kiosk, or make one yourself. It would be a wonderful gift, especially for a child. It kind of reminds me of how my uncle once tricked me by giving me a little present packed in tons of nested boxes. Except as a kid you always think bigger is better, so there was a little disappointment factor to it. This is much nicer because you get little presents the whole way along.

Photos: Sandra Juto, via Oh Happy Day!