aesthetics of joy

It’s been a long winter, hasn’t it? One that just doesn’t seem to want to leave. A few weeks ago spring felt inevitable; now it feels like it’s hiding from us. We are past the equinox, the vernal one, the one that is kin to a panoply of fresh green words like verdant and verdure and vert — yet here in New York I am donning snowboots.

Yesterday was my birthday, and it is a funny time to be born, this liminal space between seasons. I had not thought about it quite this way until I read a poem by Alice Walker in a book my friend Ashlea gave me yesterday. The book is called The World Will Follow Joy, so I think it may appeal to some of you. And inside it, I discovered a poem about being born in March. Here it is, if you’d like to read it.

March Births
by Alice Walker

Many brave souls
who inhabit my heart
entered the brightening
but still chilly door
of earthly Life in the changeable month
of March.

The deep, noble, easily bruised
Pisceans

Flowers
Themselves

Arrived in that part of the month
when hardly one white or lavender
crocus, daring, vulnerable
& sweet
can be found;
except perhaps
in the prescient
South.

And those others:
the late in the month
born
Ariesians—
Dragons
And butterflies—
Who were born
it seems
to set this world
of shyness
& daffodils
stunningly
on fire.

It was my destiny
to behold and to cherish
you all.

What these births
at winter’s end
teach us to believe
is that what looks
frozen or even dead
may burst into bloom
unexpectedly
at any time.

That to love
another,
any other, is to align oneself
with eternal spring.

It is in fact
Loving
any other being
all one ever needs
one’s self
To come to bud
& flower
once more
& be born
Again.

I don’t think you need to be March-born to find something inside this poem. It is really a poem about this time, the time before spring, when we believe we are emptied out from winter but the world tells us we can get still more empty, still more ready for the abundance to come. It’s about the anticipation that not-yet-spring holds, the coiled tightness of seed leaves pressed in their brown cases, the vigor of stamens and sepals spring-loaded into green buds. (You see them dotting the trees, like lightbulbs not yet wired up, and don’t you marvel at what force bursts them open? And then marvel again to think that it is nothing more than sunlight and water?) And it’s about renewal, more broadly: the life hidden below the surface of things, and how we can access it even in times it seems unavailable to us.

Sometimes we wonder what our birthdays mean, searching a horoscope for some reflection of ourselves in there, and for a few seconds we let ourselves believe that the alignment of planetary bodies at the moment of our first wail matters in some cosmic way. But rarely have I considered a far more practical question, which is how the earthly conditions of my birth matter in how I see the world. I wonder how it’s formed me, the condition of the earth, the temperature, the colors. And what does it say about me that though on my birthday it always feels like winter, I somehow still believe I am born in spring?

Though it’s hard to see it now, we are almost through this winter, and this week I will try to post some beautiful things to draw spring out. And in the meantime, savor the quiet! And make more space for the joy to fill…

Last week was not what I expected. I’m not sure I knew how to expect something like this. Even having been through storms before, nothing prepared me for the wreckage of Sandy, for the total shutdown in this city that moves with more vigor and constancy than any other. The subway system that never sleeps was down for most of a week. The electrical outage that coined a new neighborhood, SoPo, South of Power. The texts and tweets from those in the dark zone, as things got eerily cold and quiet.

I’m lucky to live on a high patch of ground in Brooklyn. Almost as soon as the storm was over, life in my neighborhood returned to normal. But it wasn’t a real normal. Marooned by transit in Brooklyn, it was strange to be going on with life, my team commuting from three boroughs to work out of my apartment, getting coffee at the coffee shop, eating muffins that taste the same as on any other day, while getting daily calls from my mother that she had no lights or heat, hearing my coworker fear that his apartment was being broken into, and realizing that just a few blocks away, Red Hook was devastated. It amazes me how local these events are, how one area can be completely unscathed while another just around the corner is destroyed. Part you wants to push towards normal, while part feels wrong, like normalcy is a form of ignorance of others’ suffering.

It’s clear that for many, the worst was not the storm, but what came after and what is yet to come. Still, when I saw the photos of the rainbows over the city in the wake of the storm, I felt what many others expressed in their tweets: hope. And I was reminded of many of the thoughts I had when I wrote that post a couple of months ago about the importance of rainbows. It’s a perceptual accident that we’re even able to see them — we evolved to see colors, of course, but there is no reason we need to be able to see rainbows. We’re lucky they happen to fall in our range of view. And perhaps that is why rainbows feel so like a blessing.

Of course, what hope needs to continue is help. Here is one site you can go to to provide urgently needed help close to where it’s needed. If you have Amazon Prime, you can take advantage of reduced rate overnight shipping to order supplies like flashlights and blankets and have them sent directly to the Rockaways.

It’s the beginning of a new week. A sunny morning, and many of the subway lines have started to come back. Our office is open for the first time in a week, and the class I teach at SVA will meet tonight. It feels as if everything has been on pause since the storm, and now it’s time to get moving again.

Images: Conor McDonough and Matthew Kilgore

A sampling of joyful birthday gifts I received last weekend. How lucky am I? From top left, counterclockwise: Pantone book from Maggie, gorgeous agave from Ali and Jennie, rainbow-handled Laguiole knives from Lauren and Doug, and a close-up of the amazing, Japanese-inflected packaging from a special edition of rosé Veuve Cliquot from Mimi and Brenda.

And there were others! A game from Robert, an edelweiss from Annette (Hackley girls, doesn’t this just take you back to 3rd grade and Mrs. Ericson singing “Edelweiss, edelweiss, every morning you greeeeeeet me!”), and these delicious cupcakes baked by Annie and lovingly shaped into the likeness of my favorite of Damien Hirst’s dot paintings. And all the friends who gave me the best gift of all – calling, writing, or being there to celebrate with me.

It was a sweet birthday. It couldn’t not be, surrounded as I am by such wonderful, kind, inspiring friends. Each birthday I find myself more grateful; each age seems better than the last, and I am better able to savor it.

Wishing you and yours many joys, wherever and whatever you’re celebrating today. Whether it’s Christmas, another holiday, or just an ordinary weekend, I hope it’s filled with family, friends, food, and love. Have a beautiful day!

Throughout the life of Aesthetics of Joy, people have asked me whether analyzing joy the way I do has a tendency to mute my own experiences of joy. Like an impressionist painting or a Magic Eye graphic (remember those?), does getting too close to joy somehow obscure its holistic narrative? By trying to pin it down and understand it, do we threaten it?

It would be a very sad thing for me if so, and I can only imagine this project would’ve ended much sooner than it has. But in fact my experience has been exactly the opposite. My collection of joyful experiences serves as both a celebration of life’s highest peaks and a bulwark against tough times. Writing about joy helps me capture poignantly felt, but fleeting moments. Delving into delight’s minutia reveals new layers of joy, each bringing with it the potential for wonder. I draw on this rich catalogue in my work and life, using surprise heighten the pleasure of gifts, for example, or play in a design for a client, or abundance in my home to suffuse my space with good vibes. The design principles I embrace for joy are also the design principles of my life.

At low moments, this reserve of joyful stimuli becomes like stored-up solar energy. I soak it up, reminding myself of the healing powers of time, play, music, light, nature, color, and the company of others. To return to a primal ground, and to be able to trust in these human universals, is one of the great gifts of my work.

The memory of joy, and faith in its return, is an inconspicuous freedom. But what I have learned from the parallels between my work and my life is that joy is by definition cyclical, and therefore it will come again. And so I’ve become more patient with intervals, with the spaces between joys. Tough times will come, and because everything we feel is relative, they break our habituation, remind us to be grateful, and set the yardstick by which future happiness will be measured. So, in a seeming paradox, my devotion to joy has actually made me more patient with sorrow. A life well-lived is composed of a full range of emotions, honestly felt.

Despite this, there are tough times, and during these moments it can be difficult to find the energy to push to create, to immerse in the joyful world I’m usually so content to explore. If joy is cyclical, but work is constant, it’s inevitable that at some points I find myself out of sync, as has been the case recently. It hasn’t been easy to be away from you all this long, but I’m grateful for your patience. I’ve been saving up lots to talk about, and we are in the midst of a joyous time of giving and gathering! More soon…

Image: The image above is from Best Made’s FAQ page. If anything could make something as dry-sounding as an FAQ delightful, it’s those guys.

Hello and happy Sunday!

Someone recently pointed out to me that images were not showing up in the site’s feed. If you are a regular reader then you know that this blog is all about the images, so this was not a good thing! Fortunately, I managed to figure out the problem and get it fixed. Soooo if you’d prefer to get AoJ in a reader but have been frustrated in the past by the lack of eye candy, feel free to try it again and please let me know if you have any problems.

Thanks, and thanks for reading. Xx Ingrid

I wish I had a fail whale that for AoJ that I could put up right now, but this short missive will have to do. I’ve been working on upgrades to the site for the past week or so (which is why I’ve been so scarce lately) but not all has gone as planned. Please forgive the bugs for the next few days as I get everything worked out!

Of all the years to start a blog about joy, 2009 certainly seems the least likely. The recession deepened, the foreclosure crisis widened, the wars continued. This was the year of record unemployment, of bailouts, of TARP payouts and paybacks. It was a year of pirates in Somalia and protests in Iran. It was the year of the summer of death, where it seemed just about every day we lost another significant public figure, from Ted Kennedy to Michael Jackson, Walter Cronkite to John Hughes, Merce Cunningham to Michael Jackson. As if symbolic of our general mood, dust storms turned the sky down under an eerie red.

But the low emotional mood was precisely what I had in mind when I embarked on the Aesthetics of Joy project last January. I wondered if there was something in the things that surround us that might be able to provide moments of delight in this landscape of gloom, like little joyful oases. And if so, I wondered, could we design the things around us to bring us more of these moments? If we could, we might see the benefits not just in mood, but in improved social relationships, physical health and well-being, and perhaps even sustainability, as we hold onto our joyful things longer and take better care of them.

When I started this blog in May, it was a research tool for me. I used the posts as a way to think through certain issues that puzzled me. Why are bubbles joyful? What is it about bursting motions that is so joyful? Can joy be evil? To my delight, you all seemed to find the same questions intriguing, and as the year went on, I’ve been surprised and enchanted by the thoughtful commentary you’ve added to the discussion on joy, whether here on the site or by email. The feedback I’ve received this year from the blog has been so incredibly helpful in refining my thinking on joy, and I can’t wait to share more as the book progresses and the blog continues in the new year.

To wrap up the year, I took a look back at what were the most-viewed posts of 2009. Here are the top twelve. If you happen to be a new visitor, these posts should give you a good idea of what AoJ is all about.

1.  A little wednesday afternoon joyful art…
2.  Joyful project: surprise balls
3. Making sense of color
4. Big sweet tooth
5. Aesthetics of joy or eyesore? happy roses
6. Emotion + graphic design case study: Pudding packaging
7. Invisible dogs
8. Joyful culture: flash mobs
9. “A little piece of happy”: Trident tries to get in on the joy wave
10. The joy of faux tilt-shift photography
11. Joy of hula hoops
12. Humanthesizer: music + movement = joy

It made me happy to see a few of my favorites (like nos. 1, 3, 7, 11, and 12) in the mix. I also like that the top post was an art post — there will definitely be more of that in the new year. And if there’s anything else you’d like to see more or less of, let me know.

That’s all for 2009. Thank you for reading, commenting, and supporting AoJ this year. I hope you have a joyful day and see you in the new year!

xx Ingrid

You may have noticed that this week I added sharing links for some of the most popular social networking and bookmarking services. I love the convenience of these on other sites, and I finally figured out how to add them here while still trying to keep the look as clean and uncluttered as possible.

I based my choice of links on the services on the ones I’ve used before and that others have told me they use. If there are others you’d like me to add, let me know and I’ll add the most popular choices.

Thanks for reading and thanks for sharing.

xx Ingrid

I’m off to the Galapagos for the next days for some joyful adventuring. (I know, life’s rough.) I’ve got a new lens for my Canon so expect some pictures when I’m back. Have a great early August and I’ll see you on the 11th!