aesthetics of joy

I’m a little slow in getting this up here, but last week I spent some time chatting with Nora Young, the host of CBC’s Spark, about Aesthetics of Joy. This week’s show is about rebooting your work, and also includes interviews with Jason Fried and Guy Kawasaki. I talked about some of the fundamental ideas behind Aesthetics of Joy, as well as variety of applications. Nora asked me a great question I’d never been asked before: How would you design a joyful radio show?

The episode aired on Sunday and airs again today at 2:05 ET on CBC Radio One. You can also listen here. My segment runs about nine minutes.

This was a really fun one. Many thanks to Nora and everyone at Spark for having me on the show!

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!

Riaz has these great photos of Pakistani cargo trucks on his site. He says:

What’s amazing about this is that these are just regular cargo trucks. The truck drivers put in this much effort into almost every single vehicle you see.

In Southeast Asia, especially Thailand, there is a tendency towards embellishment of buses and the like, but I have never seen anything like this! They may strike a Western eye as a little gaudy, but you can’t deny there is so much love in these designs. I’m especially struck by the contrast between the plain attire of the drivers and their over-the-top vehicles. I wonder if this somehow became a sanctioned form of self-expression, and so, in the face of sumptuary convention, all creative energy gets channeled here.

See the full set here: Truckistani