In the busyness of the holidays, sometimes it’s hard to find time to stop, breathe, and take note of joyful moments. Slow down for a minute with some tiny things:

Artist Dalton Ghetti carved this amazing alphabet on pencils. Odd but lovely. {via Odd Stuff Magazine}

Many small pleasures beat a few larger ones. (More reason to indulge in tiny sweets!)

Bees have feelings, too. New research in Scientific American suggests these remarkable little insects have an emotional life.

Silly little art project, low-fi and delightful: Single Lane Superhighway. Go draw a car. It makes you feel a part of something. {via @alexandrapulver}

“It was like finding little gems.” Photographer David Liitschwager captured all the living creatures within a cubic foot in a variety of different climates to draw attention to the abundance of denizens of a swath of habitat that “could fit in your lap.” National Geographic. {via The Guardian}

Stay sane this pre-holiday week. Try not to rush through, but find the beauty in the craziness, and savor it!

Every week my inbox is filled with more joyful images, events, and links than I can possibly write about. So I’m toying around with the idea of a weekly or semi-weekly collection of joyful links. Let me know what you think.

Rainbow shredder: wouldn’t it be amazing if all your bills came out like this? By Chrissie Macdonald, photograph by John Short, {via Birdwatching, a very cool site featuring the work of female graphic designers}

Slate: Why are car paint colors so boring? {via @mimiochun}

Guardian: Northern lights appearing much further south this year than usual – amazing photos. (I’ll be on the hunt for these in Iceland this new year’s eve…)

A team of researchers has developed a 360 degree panoramic ball camera. I love how this adds a playful gesture to a functional object. The camera takes a full panoramic photo when thrown up in the air – must be seen to be believed. {via @brainpicker}

And finally, AoJ was selected as a Weekly Best by the beautifully visual news reading app Flud last week!

I’m in Portland this weekend, and will be joyspotting here. What shouldn’t I miss?

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!

I’ve taken many plane rides before, but never seen a landscape quite like this. I recently stumbled upon this article showing Holland’s tulip fields from above. Can you believe there’s a landscape that actually looks like this? It’s like agricultural earth art. I had to dig up some more images for inspiration. Let’s hope all these April showers will bring us some, well, you know…

Images: livetowander, Daily Mail, powerfocusfotografie, Daily Mail, Samuel_Leo, _Darek, heavenuphere.

Matt sent me these whimsical images of public structures “fixed” with legos. The pieces are done by artist Jan Vormann, in an attempt to “support Mayor Bloomberg in his everyday-struggle to make this city even more amazing!”

Between these and the precious potholes I featured a couple of weeks ago, I’m starting to see a theme around the idea of “joyful repair.” Add to these some of the initiatives at Droog’s takeover of Governor’s island last fall, such as Heleen Klopper’s Woolfiller, and there really seems to be a pattern. I see this as an emerging desire to salvage damaged things, to fill in gaps and holes with something beautiful, whimsical, and colorful. Of course, these are not serious attempts at repair (Woolfiller excepted), but they get us to pay more attention to our environment, and the condition of the world around us, in a joyful way. There’s something compelling about the motivation behind the work — the need to make something whole, and not just whole, but somehow better and brighter than it was. These pieces suggest that a repaired thing can be not just as good as, but better than a new thing, and for me, this is what makes these provocations go beyond humor and novelty to be truly, deeply joyful.

Spotted this installation near the corner of 33rd and Lex a few weeks ago. Despite the bitter cold, people kept stopping to play. Does anyone know whose work this is?

Yes, the Georgia O’Keefe show at the Whitney was joyful, but this magenta-haired lady in the lobby stole the spotlight this weekend. Pink hair on a teenager is ho-hum, but the same shocking hue on a more mature subject is a delightful surprise.

I just hope when I get older I have similar confidence to not always act my age!

Remember these? I found one lying (improperly) discarded on a subway platform back in September and labeled it “joyful litter.” Now, the NYT explains: it’s a public art project by artist Reed Seifer.

Read more, here.

{via @swissmiss}

I didn’t realize the MTA was putting joyful messages on the backs of metro cards but I think it’s a lovely idea. At least if people can’t be bothered to bin their garbage, the rest of us can get a momentary boost!

Yesterday I posted on miniature sweets and the perspective shift that comes from out-scaled items. On the opposite extreme, giant sweets seem to captivate artists and designers the world over. And because their enormity makes them impossible to overlook, the giant objects seem to have an even stronger Alice-in-Wonderland effect.

Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s Dropped Cone makes me feel like a Lilliputian living in a land where if I’m lucky, I might catch a dripping from a giant toddler’s melting ice cream. Martha Friedman’s Waffle (currently on view here in Brooklyn) and street artist Celso’s Apples have the similar effect of making me reconsider my own scale and the scale of all the common objects around me.

Of course, scale shifts can go both ways. Oversized objects can have the effect of making us feel ill at ease with our place in the universe and out of control of the events that shape our lives. Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s Knife Slicing Through Wall sculpture highlights this darker side of scale shifting. But sweets are inherently joyful — the sugar, the color, the aroma of baking, the ritual of eating — so giant treats create a much more pleasurable transformation of perspective: magical, childlike, and fun.

Brooklyn designer and studiomate of mine Azusa Hirota brings this whimsical quality to functional objects, allowing interaction with these giant sweets, instead of just viewing. Her chair, a giant cupcake, puts the user in between the cake and icing, so that you’re literally surrounded by the experience. Everyone I’ve seen sitting in it seems to have a big smile on their face. Her giant doughnut, designed in collaboration with Tawny Hixson, transforms a common inner tube into an object of delight. I remember my days spent tubing down the Nam Song river in Vang Vieng, Laos, and it strikes me that it would have been such a wonderful thing to see fellow travelers drifting gently downstream on giant Krispy Kremes!

See more of Azusa’s work here. Thank you Maggie, for the waffle tip that inspired the idea for this whole post!

Did I miss any wonderful giant sweets out there? Let me know.

I’m glad Stéphanie Kilgast mentions that these delicious-looking treats are 1:12 scale on her Flickr page, because otherwise I would be calling to ask how she could FedEx over some of those macaroons from Paris. Unfortunately you can’t eat these tiny cakes, but you can buy them on her Etsy page, or gaze admiringly at the many others on her photostream.

I’ve written about miniaturization before on the site, and why we seem to love tiny things. It’s a phenomenon I trace back to childhood and the downscaling of all the elements of real life into toys. As adults, tiny things give us an Alice-in-Wonderland kind of perspective shift. They make us aware of our scale, and allow us to see things in a new way. (They’re also just pretty darn cute.)

Thanks to Lisa at My Artful Life for the tip!

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.

Joyful wrappings at Purl Soho, via simple song. A little early for Christmas, but just in time for a little “thinking of you” present…

Outdoor art by Samuel Francois plays with contexts urban and rural using color and pattern. He considers himself “a joyful manipulator of symbols,” stating “his goal is above all to preach a transitory art of which spontaneity and decasualization of the images are the bases of the work.”

via Oh Joy!

If the poor dog must have a cast, at least it’s a joyful one!

“Spotted” in the window of Lisa Perry on Spring St. this week. Do you think you’d even notice it was raining if you had this umbrella?

Studio Lin airbrushed the edges of these stacks of invitations to create custom gradients. I especially love the way the color pools and mingles in the shadows, a bonus effect of the intense color planes.

Via Oh Joy!

It departs this week so get there by Saturday if you want to check it out!

Thanks to Maggie for the tip.

Image: 16 Miles of String

It is out of control how much joy the world is putting out there today! I can’t keep up.

These polka dots were spotted on a pedestrian walkway in Times Square by my friend Maggie. She says, “The minute I saw them, esp as a New Yorker knowing they weren’t there before, definitely got a burst of JOY!”

Great find! They remind me of the purple footprints that appeared around the city in the 1980s. Does anyone know what these polka dots are all about? Is there a message or are they just for fun?

A couple more joyful images from my friend Ben. If I had a slide in my building like the one on the left, I would never take the stairs!