aesthetics of joy

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!

I love this idea for a custom baby gift: a book made by photographing common objects with the names spelled out in baby blocks. A joyful gift you can guarantee they won’t already have.

Lay it out and have it printed on Blurb, which has the nicest looking photobooks around.

via Design Mom