aesthetics of joy

Do you read Erin Loechner’s wonderful Design for Mankind blog? She has long been finding some of the most beautiful, joyful findings on the web, but lately her blog has gotten even better as she’s adopted a “slow blogging” philosophy and taken time to share more about her approach. I respect the open and vulnerable way she puts her thoughts out there, and the community she has built around values that I share, namely that design (and specifically aesthetics) can change the world.

Back in February, Erin asked me to share some of my perspectives on “Why Design Matters” with her readers, and I realized I never linked back to it to share with you. It was fun to see how she translated my discursive ramblings and related them to her point of view. You can read the post here.

A couple of weeks ago, these beautiful images caught my eye on Design for Mankind, and I was struck by the philosophy of the artist, Evonne Bellefluer. She says, “I don’t think art should be about communicating some ideology. Art, like fashion, is meant to be enjoyed … something I look to to make me happy.”

I smiled to read that because of course that is an ideology, and not just any ideology, but the one I embrace in Aesthetics of Joy. Art can serve many legitimate purposes, among them provocation, representation, union, dissent, exploration, catharsis. Art can incite and art can woo, both credibly. But rarely can art be purely joyful without interrogation of its claim towards seriousness. And yet what higher purpose could art strive for than to improve wellbeing simply through beauty?

Erin quotes Evonne as saying, “I had a conversation with a friend the other day who suggested that my art didn’t belong in a gallery setting because it had nothing to say.” Must everything talk to our conscious minds to be meaningful? This ignores the reality that most of our brain is unconscious mind, which processes the deep, wordless notions of euphoria, yellowness, buoyancy, and belonging in chemical silence. We are much more sensation and emotion than we are ideas.

Erin’s blog always makes me think. Here’s one more post about slowing down. I hope it sparks something for your too.

Link: “On Intention” on Design for Mankind
Images: via Evonne Bellefleur on Behance

You may never have heard the term FOMO (fear of missing out), but you’ve likely felt it. If you live in a big city like New York, it’s almost impossible not to have a pang of it once in awhile. On a Friday night, after a workweek that seemed to move through me more than with me, I’ve often succumbed to its pressure, slipped on a pair of heels, and headed out to a cocktail party or event rather than curling up in an armchair with a book. It’s not rational, which makes it harder to resist. FOMO slides into spaces of longing, the gaps between our desired lives and our real ones, and sticks there, like a fish bone you ate by accident and can’t quite seem to swallow.

Social media makes FOMO worse — for some, it may even be the root cause. No one instagrams the lame party, or posts on Facebook about the fight they’re having with their spouse, or tweets that they are ordering takeout from the same Thai place for the fifth weekend in a row. Feeds are self-edited to be glittering displays of fun, adventure, and romance. At every moment, we are missing out on something, or at least it seems that way at the time.

And it’s not just fun we fear missing. Over the last few years, as Twitter’s river of news and updates has become more rapid, I find I worry about missing an article that is relevant to my work, or some piece of inspiration that could be the vital link that brings a chapter together. It doesn’t matter that I have a folder brimming with more material than I could post in a decade. I still worry that something better might slip by right on the day I decide not to log in.

But as the new year settled in to its first days, and I went down with the epic cold that’s had everyone sneezing and hacking, I noticed something. People I talked to, and posts I read, were all talking about the same kinds of intentions for the new year: to ease up and slow down. One friend wrote about going on an inspiration diet, using the time saved by reading and browsing less to make more from the inspiration he already had. Others wrote about taking time for introspection, limiting technology, and spending more time with family and friends. It was all very in sync with what I was feeling, cuddled up and coughing on my sofa. It was the complete opposite of FOMO, something more aptly called JOMO: the joy of missing out.

I can’t take credit for the term — it was coined by writer Anil Dash after the birth of his son. He writes:

There can be, and should be, a blissful, serene enjoyment in knowing, and celebrating, that there are folks out there having the time of their life at something that you might have loved to, but are simply skipping.

By the laws of physics, you can only be in one place at a time. You’re going to miss things. The question is how you deal with it. To make deliberate choices, and to revel in the ones you’ve made — that’s what JOMO is, and what I’m embracing this year.

Joy is about presence, about being in the moment and soaking in every sensation that moment has to offer you. The fear of missing out intrudes on an experience, causing you to feel torn between different moments, and lessening your pleasure wherever you are. When you adopt an attitude of joy about missing out, you let go of other possibilities, reclaim the moment you’re in, and set yourself up to enjoy it. Often, that means choosing simple pleasures over flashy ones — the ones that feel good over the ones that look good in photos. It’s a home-cooked dinner over an eight-course tasting menu. It’s a bike ride with family over an exclusive event. It’s poems over tweets. Above all, it’s savoring what you’re doing and who you’re with, immersing yourself in the real pleasures of the experience, as opposed to the imagined ones a few miles away. It’s remembering that this moment is imperfect but completely your own, and best of all, it’s happening right now.

More: JOMO! by Anil Dash

The painter of Ireland works with a green brush – this is nothing new. But I was unprepared for the extravagance of it all. On arriving in the Southeast, near Cork, my jet-lagged eyes had to recalibrate to process all the shades of green, all the textures. It is a kind of vegetal madness here, a raucous glut of sun-soaked growth. It is a cliché illustrated in hyperbole.

No surface is uncovered by moss or grass or lichen, no branch left unbowed by a corolla of leaves. The plant kingdom sorts itself messily into layers. Ferns spring out of tufts of olive-hued moss, on tree trunks filmed with algae. Grasses race skyward, indecorously. Duckweed forgets its place; it traces a lacy path up drains onto driveways, a cheery, swampy carpet. Frills of perennials pour out of crevices in walls. Spring got the memo here: It. Is. On.

I walk until I hit a fence, trace it until I find a gate and walk on. My footsteps compress the grass, scenting the air with chlorophyll. A rabbit skitters nervously across the field. Flora own this place; the fauna are just tenants here. And we modern, house-dwelling humans are only visitors – guests if we behave ourselves, interlopers if we misstep.

With fresh memories of winter, it is a joy to be in this landscape of renewal, immersed in such giddy reanimation. Liberated from ice and hard ground, the yellow-green fronds thrum with audible energy. Something in our souls is listening. This verdant quickening is our reveille, a call to slough off winter’s slowness and participate in regeneration. In temperate climates, it’s a profound inflection point in our relationship with our surroundings, marking the moment where the landscape begins to feel alive to us, and to be a source of energy.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this after listening to a wonderful interview with the late Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue (on a recommendation from my dear friend Mara). O’Donohue brims with wisdom about the relevance of beauty to meaning in life, and speaking of landscapes, he observes:

I think it makes a huge difference when you wake in the morning and come out of your house whether you believe your are walking into a dead geographical location which is used to get to a destination or whether you are emerging into a landscape that is just as much if not more alive as you but in a totally different form. And if you go towards it with an open heart and a real watchful reverence, that you will be absolutely amazed at what it will reveal to you.

(Before I go on, I must urge you to listen to the interview because reading the quote cannot give you the feeling you get from hearing O’Donohue’s placid, lyrical voice. I hope you will.)

Now, coming back to the topic at hand, the frenzy of unfurling and blossoming, the green, the growth – these aesthetics of renewal, the reminders of the simmering life in our surroundings. Why should we care about these artifacts of the landscape? Why, as O’Donohue says, should we be bothered with what they might reveal to us? Or rather, in an age where foraging is a hobby rather than a subsistence strategy, why should these inedible, unsellable displays matter to us at all?

Our emotions are often vestigial imprints of our ancestors’ rhythms, and without conscious explanation our neurotransmitters soak our brains with pleasure chemicals in these same cycles. No matter how detached from the earth we are in our workaday existence, our bodies vibrate to its frequencies. The return of greenness feels like a return to life. It’s why we hold festivals to celebrate cherry blossoms. It’s why we freak out about ramps. Spring is our stirring. It rises into us from the ground up.

(Also, a lush environment signals other things that might be beneficial. Clean air. Unpolluted rainwater. Sunshine. Good property values. This practical lens can’t be underestimated.)

Of course, the greenness is just the surface. That lush field is all cell division, pollen, and spores – plants grasping for one another like freshman at a frat party. All this wild greening is nature’s adolescence, and those allergies are testament to a large-scale seduction. These aesthetics of vibrance are also aesthetics of sex. And plant sex brings about all kinds of things we like, such as those that might be baked in a pie, or those that taste best with a sprinkling of sea salt and some Tuscan olive oil.

It’s strange to say from this vantage that I had no particular interest in Ireland before I ended up here. Soul-starved by a winter that dragged despite its mildness, I had a craving for verdure. But despite the platitudes of an emerald isle, sold to us Americans by cereal box leprechauns and intensely scented soap, I hadn’t thought about the greenness in the planning. It was almost an accident that I ended up here: a workshop that never happened, a scrambled plan, an affordable airfare. And suddenly I was here, submerged in it, and grateful.

Landscapes can wake us up, recall us to ourselves, stir us out of apathy, heal pains. They absorb tremendous anxiety and radiate energy. We are just starting to understand the emotional impacts of nature, but they seem to parallel the physical effects of plants, which complement our physiology, breathing in our effluent carbon dioxide, and exhaling oxygen. In seeing some rare, wild landscapes this week, I’m reminded of the destruction we are bringing to so many of these sacred places. I hope through a deeper understanding of what they give us, we might feel inspired to take better care of them.

I can’t believe I nearly missed this. Eight weeks straight on a plane, and you’d think I’d be spending a bit more time with the New York Times app on my iPhone. But, no, this incredibly well-considered piece of synthesis by David Brooks nearly slid right by me.

It’s not that Brooks is saying anything truly new here. Writers in the diverse fields he mentions – neuroscience, psychology, sociology, etc. – have been building a case for the integral connection between reason and emotion for years, decades even. But his distillation of the key insights of “the new humanism,” as he puts it, is especially sharp and clear:

This growing, dispersed body of research reminds us of a few key insights. First, the unconscious parts of the mind are most of the mind, where many of the most impressive feats of thinking take place. Second, emotion is not opposed to reason; our emotions assign value to things and are the basis of reason. Finally, we are not individuals who form relationships. We are social animals, deeply interpenetrated with one another, who emerge out of relationships.

What Brooks offers is a synthesis that points to synthesis – the reuniting of concepts our culture has told us are dialectical, disconnected, or broken into disparate parts. It occurs to me that the shift in thinking he describes is really the shift from object-oriented thinking to systems thinking. Our brains are not a set of discrete objects, but a unified system; we cannot distinguish the functions of one part from the whole without fallacy. And we ourselves are not discrete units, but rather nodes in social systems. Everything is interconnected. It’s a profound shift in worldview.

These images, in case you’re wondering, come from a 2009 piece in Technology Review called “Time Travel Through the Brain,” showing a kind of history of brain imaging. The images have no specific link to Brooks’s NYT piece, but looking at the images with their branching fibers and tendrils, I was reminded that all the brain really is is connections. Synthesis, linking things together, drawing multiple inputs into a cohesive picture – this is what the brain does. Any structure as reaching as this one cannot really be a dichotomy in how it behaves.

Of the three insights I’ve quoted from Brooks above, the first two are foundational to Aesthetics of Joy, and the third is deeply significant. How quickly we forget the effortless magic of our unconscious mind, a silent engine, a hidden processor that runs in the background, quietly alert. Aesthetics of Joy is about the language that speaks to this unconscious mind, the language of form, movement, surface, and character that communicates with the mute sensemaker that is our emotional brain. Joy is sense, as is sadness or contentment or shame. All of these are a kind of proto-rationality, a set of organizing principles that help us prioritize our interactions and parcel out our precious, limited conscious attention towards the world. To say “our emotions assign value to things” has an ironic accuracy. We have for so long assumed that the rational brain assigns value through measurement, probability, and calculation, and that our emotions misappraise value. Now that we know the limits of our tools, our inbuilt estimator looks better and better. Though relative and mercurial, emotionally-calibrated value offers a truer reflection of a thing’s importance in our sphere.

For design, I hope this emerging synthetic view will lead to a more synthetic practice. Too often, I think designers swing between extremes of rigor and intuition. Because design can be hard to explain, we justify our decisions based on hyper-rational principles or we fall back on “it just feels right.” What I’m working towards, and what I know others are as well, is an informed intuition – an understanding of why things feel right when they do, and a language for communicating this among ourselves and to others. A new humanism, I hope, will also help to bring about a newly humanistic kind of design.

NYT: “The New Humanism”
Technology Review: “Time Travel Through the Brain”

I had never heard of critic Philip Gilbert Hamerton or The Quest of Happiness until a tip from Annette deFerrari, the artist/illustrator behind this excellent diagram of Plutchik’s emotional taxonomy. Annette sent me this quote:

“My experience,” said an old gentleman to me, “has been that I could never succeed in getting the special kind of happiness I had wanted or hope for, but that other kinds of happiness which I did not want and had never hoped for were supplied to me, in the course of life, most lavishly and abundantly. I therefore ended by discovering, though it took me a long time to make the discovery, that the right way to enjoy the happiness within my reach was not to form an ideal of my own and be disappointed when it was not realized — for that it never was – but to accept the opportunities for enjoying life which were offered by life itself from year to year and from day to day. Since I took things in this temper, I have enjoyed really a great amount of happiness, though it has been of a kind entirely different from anything I ever anticipated or laid plans for when I was young.”
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton, The Quest of Happiness, 1897

I’m so glad to have found this quote because this is such a foundational idea in my thinking about joy. In a way, you could say that joy is not something you seek, but rather something you discover. While we go in pursuit of happiness, joy finds us.

Why is this important? Because it suggests that joy is dictated not just by what happens to us but also by our expectations. While it’s important to plan for the future and put ourselves in circumstances that we believe will make us happiest in the future, we can’t control exactly what will result from our efforts. And at the moment-to-moment level, we don’t know how others around us will behave or what opportunities or challenges will crop up without warning. When our expectations are very specific and narrow, we increase the chances of disappointment. When we’re more open to a range of possibilities, we create the possibility of savoring “the happiness within our reach,” or joy.

Thinking of happiness as a longitudinal measure of our emotional wellbeing, there are really two components: How happy are the individual moments, strung together like links in a chain, that make up our lives? And how satisfied are we with the trajectory, the broad sweeping arc that line is taking? The latter is a macro decision, and we address dissatisfaction with this arc by making changes to the path – changing jobs, moving cities, adjusting work/life balance, and so on. The first question is micro; it relates to each moment. Are we enjoying the experiences that our trajectory has put in our path? Are we attuned to the joys in front of us, or always comparing them with the hypothetical joys on another path? Or the anticipated joys at the end of the journey?

There’s a dance between these two components of happiness, the arc and the moments, and it seems human to err on one side or the other. This is another articulation of that idea, by Jessa Crispin, clipped from Liz Danzico’s Bobulate blog:

I was having a conversation with a writer the other day, and he stated that the best things are always by-products. Happiness is a by-product, and I loved that he said that. You can plot your journey to success or happiness or wealth or whatever it is you’re looking for, but if you’re too focused on the end result, you’re going to miss anything good going on around you.

I love that idea that happiness is a by-product, because it points out that the trajectory is not just superimposed on the moments by our will; the moments also alter the trajectory. All of us have instances where a moment was a revelation, dramatically shifting the course of our lives. Seen this way, happiness is like an accretion of accidents, and our job is to put ourselves in the way of joyful accidents and be poised to recognize them when they happen. And this is where habits of mind like our expectations, openness, and attentiveness come in.

I’ve been reading Maslow lately, and found myself really touched by this this statement, which seems to me also along the lines of this discussion:

The great lesson from the true mystics, from the Zen monks, and now also from the Humanistic and Transpersonal psychologists—that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one’s daily life, in one’s neighbors, friends, and family, in one’s back yard, and that travel may be a flight from confronting the sacred—this lesson can easily be lost.

This idea of “the sacred in the ordinary” (or “the joy of the mundane” or “the delight in the everyday”) is I think the fundamental belief that lies beneath my work, on Aesthetics of Joy, and everything else I do. I’ve spent so much of my life dazzled by inconsequential things, but I think why I try to show here is that these actually are the things with the most consequence – for our happiness, our wellbeing, our sustainability. The ability to be fascinated is perhaps the most essential quality for a joyful life.

As 2010 winds down, I’ve found myself feeling a bit tormented by all the things that didn’t get done. Things I’d wanted to achieve, but found themselves back-burnered by more pressing obligations, or the simple limits on what one person with two hands can reasonably expect to complete in a year. Then I looked at my photos: there were celebrations in Maine and trips to the wilds of New Zealand, visits with old friends and new ones in Sydney, a family gathering in Santa Fe, and all kinds of escapades in between. And looking at all these images, with so many different family and friends, I just felt happy. It may not have been the year I planned, but it was a good year.

So, as the new year begins, I wish you the ability to recognize the “happiness within your reach,” the by-products of your great plans, the sacred in your ordinary. In other words, have a very joyful new year!

Art by Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson (just the perfect sort of ethereal beauty for a thoughtful, liminal day such as this one!)

Yesterday while riding the Q train into Manhattan, my friend Maggie and I made a joyful discovery! She noticed it first — flashes of graffiti that looked cute, almost childlike. Then as we watched, the recurring images resolved themselves into an animation, a kind of underground zoetrope.

I was too slow with the video camera to catch it, but courtesy of YouTube, you can see it above. A little googling revealed that the work is called Masstransiscope, and was installed on a disused subway platform by independent filmmaker Bill Brand in 1980. Evidently it fell into disrepair, but was restored in 2008.

The piece is pure joy. It has no other purpose than to be a surprising bright spot in a morning commute, an interjection of whimsy into the dark underground. Does that make it frivolous? It reminds me of a post I wrote last summer about public art, which speculated on the purpose and value of art commissioned for communal spaces. The post was a response to an article that disparaged recent works in this field as amusing but “relatively empty experiences,” and in it I argued that joy is a very valid, and indeed, an important purpose for public art.

Recently, I read something that bolstered my conviction on this point. In Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton references a theory advanced at the turn of the 20th century by German art historian Wilhelm Worringer. One component of his theory explains our collective taste in art as a kind of craving for what we lack as a society. In de Botton’s words, a society “would love in art whatever it did not possess in sufficient supply within itself. Public art, then, serves a critical rebalancing function, especially in cities. Color, light, and playful forms restore harmony to a dense gray city. Lighthearted art creates moments that break the stress of urban living. Soft sculptures create ease in a hard, concrete landscape. They are emotional oases, and in my view, they are essential to a vibrant, healthy city life.

I think there’s food for further thought here. Some things have no justification on rational grounds. They could seem pointless or even wasteful, but our increasing awareness of the importance of emotion may illuminate their value. What else seems frivolous or unnecessary, but might actually be vital because of its emotional function?

What a great visualization (click image to see larger) of color associations with emotions and other abstract ideas across different cultures from the people at Information is Beautiful. A nice complement to Emotionally Vague, a project I wrote about last year that looked at color associations across a narrower set of emotions.

It’s especially interesting to see what color associations are near universal: Passion, Purity, Truce, Cold, and Evil all have consistent meaning. Of course, my eye first went to joy, which appears to have consensus on yellow, until you realize only two cultures are represented. I’d bet that association would reasonably widespread, though.

One thing I’m wishing for here is a little more rigor on the sourcing. “Web sources” sounds dodgy; I’d love it if someone out there would do a proper survey, at least of the primary emotions, across a large number of cultures. My hypothesis would be that the more visceral and affective a concept is, the less culturally determined and more universal the color response would be. So physiological concepts like hot and cold, and emotional terms like passion, anger, sadness, and joy would be more consistent across cultures. More rational concepts like luck, luxury, and marriage, would be cultural determined and therefore prone to variation. Just a hypothesis, at this point.

via R. Walker (thanks!)

Rob Walker (of Consumed) had an interesting post on his blog recently evolving the discussion around my Psychology Today post about Unhappy Hipsters and the emotional tenor of modern design. He picks up on my assertion that delight is at root an emotion connected with abundance. In my post, I wrote:

I think that modernism’s restrained quality is fundamentally in tension with the idea of delight. Delight is an emotion of abundance — a celebration of sensation and richness. Delight and joy are primally connected to wellness, and wellness in nature is lush, plump, vibrant, and bountiful.

Walker observes that there’s often something enchanting about abundance in the context of interior design, such as in many of the homes featured in “Sneak Peeks” on the blog Design*Sponge. (The photo above is from a similar type of series: The Selby‘s photos of the homes of creative people. This one is from the home of Sydney gallerist Sarah Cottier, photographer Ashley Barber, and their daughter Ruby.) We value a little abundance in the form of creative clutter because it makes a space invitingly human; collections of real things arranged at non-90 degree angles tell us we’re in a home, rather than a sanitized photo studio or furniture showroom. At the same time, Walker voices a healthy skepticism about the joys of abundance:

I am somewhat cautious about that connection between delight and abundance. Buying into that idea full-on would be emotionally catastrophic — I mean, maybe those “hipsters” are unhappy, but watch an episode of Hoarders and decide for yourself how delightful that abundance seems.

This contrast — between joyful collecting and anxious hoarding — raises some big questions that push the discussion on abundance into an important area. It’s clear there’s a line where things go from joyful plenty to horrifying excess. But where is that line? And why do many of us seem to have so much trouble staying on the healthy side of it?

A clue to our precarious relationship with abundance lies within our own brains, and the neural wiring that underpins our emotional responses. Many emotional reactions are triggered unconsciously by aesthetic (or sensory) elements. Aesthetic elements can take on different meanings through cultural encoding and personal experience, but underneath these layers there is often a kernel of biological inclination, shaped by evolution. One example, which I alluded to in my PT post, is people’s general preference for curves. A primal, unconscious part of our brain (the amygdala) has an intrinsic, background-level fear response to sharp corners, a reaction that makes sense. This emotional response raises our alertness around potentially harmful objects, and by consequence, our chances of survival. The response is purported to have developed over the more than 80,000 generations of the Pleistocene era when humans were evolving into their present form, and were surrounded by an environment where the angular things they might have encountered included cliff edges, tree branches, and predators’ claws — all things around which it’s unwise to be too cavalier.

I believe there’s a similar evolutionary principle going on with abundance, a hardwired predilection etched deep into our brains. My view is that a preference for abundance is a natural residue of generations of evolution in an environment where “too much of a good thing” conferred greater chances of survival. This is why we pig out beyond satiation at buffets and why candy stores make us feel like kids — because these things are aesthetic signifiers of a secure resource stream, something we are predisposed to celebrate and revel in.

At the same time, what was adaptive in the Pleistocene can be maladaptive in the post-industrial age, especially when taken to extremes. For most of us living in the first world, the unpredictable cycles of plenty and privation have been leveled out to such an extent that our greatest want is a lack of ripe mangoes in January. Abundance runs amok; it clogs our arteries and our atmosphere and it accumulates not just in the homes of hoarders, but throughout our environment. It hogs resources, giving some people unimaginable riches while consigning many more to persistent scarcity. This state of affairs is clearly not joyful; it’s rife with guilt, anxiety, and shame. When the population of humans was small relative to the available resources, and resources came and went in uncertain cycles, an insatiable craving for abundance made sense; now, this proclivity can be a truly destructive influence.

But our genes don’t know this. So the hardwired emotional responses that once worked so well to enhance our well-being and survival are now sometimes odds with the same ends. We stuff ourselves, shop-till-we-drop, and hoard because on some level it feels good, even if consciously we know it’s not good for us. Fortunately, we are not slaves to our genetic predispositions. While their influence over our behavior can be profound, it is modulated and controlled by a frontal cortex capable of understanding the dilemmas we face and making necessary tradeoffs. One way we do this is by exercising control over our actions, turning down a second helping or politely declining a tempting sales pitch. Another way is through the design of our environment, and this is where I think an aesthetics of abundance could be quite powerful. Can we design a feeling of abundance without the actual abundance, i.e. without having to use a lot of material, or hoard a whole ton of stuff?

What follows are a few early observations on the idea of aesthetics of abundance, along with some examples. Celebrations such as festivals are a big inspiration in this area, because they often feature abundant, yet temporary, displays, meaning they often need to feel big but be small enough to pack away later. Balloons are often used to create a sense of abundance, even though the actual material they consume is comparatively small. Confetti (though problematic in the cleanup), is another example of a product that creates a sense of abundance with little material. Surface treatments, such as patterns, can also create a feeling of abundance, particularly stripes and polka dots. I love how these stripes on the side of the Barcelona Flower Market seem to swell and move, suggesting the bounty inside:

Designer Paul Smith certainly understands this principle as well:

Another example — these polka dots from the Trash: Any Color You Like project take a feature of city life that normally fades into the background and makes it feel more abundant (an effective way to get people to reflect on the consequences of abundance!).

Variegated color and texture treatments also work to create abundance. Because of the rainbow hues, these chopsticks feel like “more” than they would if they were all one color.

A feeling of abundance can also be created with form and texture, such as with the ruffles that are in shop windows across the country right now for spring.

Abundance is not just about form, but also about context. A teaspoon of sprinkles feels abundant on an ice cream cone; in a giant field, the same teaspoon is insignificant. The cornucopia symbol is apt — abundance needs something to spill out from, a container to press against. It’s easier to make a small home feel abundant than a big one, which is a counterintuitive principle of some comfort to us small-apartment city dwellers. By designing small frames, we can make the things inside feel more bountiful. There’s also a role for design in illustrating the line between abundance and pure excess. That’s part of why the Design*Sponge “Sneak Peeks” are so satisfying. They show managed clutter, abundance in balance. Like a healthy psyche, they are full of emotional experiences, memories, and desires, arranged with some acknowledgment of a rational super-structure. Effusive, but not chaotic.

Like anything taken to extreme, abundance ceases to be joyful once it crosses a certain line. Science doesn’t offer much insight as to where the line is; we just know it when we see it. Love in excess becomes infatuation. Self-confidence becomes narcissism. Neatness becomes compulsion. Too much of any good thing is no good at all. The overstuffed houses of hoarders and the ultra-minimal, bare bones interiors featured in design magazines are two ends of a spectrum of beliefs about homes and happiness. I could just as easily take on the hoarders as the zen-modernists, except for one thing — no one is advocating the hoarder lifestyle. Even the hoarders view their condition with shame. Minimalism, on the other hand, is often preached as a lifestyle nirvana — a blissful, transcendent state achieved by letting go of material things. For some people, this kind of muted emotional landscape is a relief, a break from a high-stress job, information overload, or a plethora of buzzing devices. But for most of us, I’d contend that this kind of environment runs against our emotional nature. We’re made to feel joy in an abundance of color, texture, and sensory stimulation; it’s what makes the neurons fire and the brain grow and develop. Rather than fight it, I’d love to see us use design to create a more sustainable kind of abundance, one that gives us delight without compromising the joy of generations to come.

Images: Barcelona Flower Market via yatzer; Paul Smith Mini via Flickr; trashbags by Adrian Kondratowicz; chopsticks via DWR; ruffles: S/S 2010 shows by Oscar de la Renta, Valentino, and Colette Dinnigan, via Style.com.

Murketing: Clutter, Objects, Joy
Psychology Today / Design and the Mind: Unhappy Hipsters: Does Modern Architecture Make Us Gloomy?

Fascinating piece by Daniel B. Smith in Sunday’s NYT magazine about the emerging field of ecopsychology, which studies the relationship between the health of the natural world and that of the mind. The field views mental health more broadly than any preceding branch of psychology, suggesting that our sanity is inextricable from the vitality of our surroundings and the strength of our connection to them.

This makes intuitive sense to me. After all, our physical health is deeply dependent on the health of our immediate environment. Perhaps before the Industrial Revolution we could have conceived of our bodies as separate entities, impermeable to pollution. But now we know that chemicals in our waterways end up in our veins and that smog chokes our lungs as much as our visibility. The link between environmental soundness and mind is less apparent, but still plausible. If we evolved for an environment filled with the aesthetics of lush, green life, but we live in an environment that deprives us of these aesthetics, isn’t it possible that this state of being becomes like a nutritional deficit of the mind? That robbing our environment of certain essential stimuli decreases mental performance and makes us not only less happy but also less functional?

There are already disorders recognized to have a relationship to the stimuli we take in from our environment. The appropriately named SAD (seasonal affective disorder) is a kind of depression related to the low levels of available light in winter. SAD is worst at higher latitudes where the light difference between seasons is most extreme. Yet some Scandinavian peoples, such as Icelanders, have been found to have an immunity to this condition, perhaps because it was selected as a favorable survival condition by evolution. This is only one data point, but it suggests to me that people may evolve for certain environments, that our brains may be subtly wired through generations of interactions with a place, and that the rapid rate of change (/devastation) of those places could be a latent source of emotional trauma.

Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht terms this trauma solastalgia, which combines the Latin solacium, meaning comfort, and the Greek root -algia, meaning pain. He defines his coinage as “the pain experienced when there is a recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault…a form of homesickness one gets one when is still at ‘home.’ ” It’s an instantly evocative word to match an evocative concept (though perhaps not so precise — I can think of lots of cases of comfort-pain that have nothing to do with place). Smith notes that the word has spread rapidly, not just in academic or journalistic circles, but as a title for songs and works of art. The idea of defending our land as a people is nothing new, but throughout history usually it is from invasion, and what we are defending is livelihood — the resources for living and the livelihood we have created in a place. This goes much deeper to say that environmental destruction is a slow, creeping invasion, and what we are defending is not just our livelihood, but our sanity.

The most interesting aspect of this discussion, for me, is the recognition of certain kinds of environmental aesthetic stimuli as essential to mental health. We know that the brain is a sensing, processing machine, requiring constant stimuli to make sense of the world. Remove all stimuli, and people quickly go insane; without new data points, the brain stops making sense of itself. Too much stimuli and we become overloaded — equally unhealthy. But beyond variations in quantity, there are also variations in kind to pay attention to. Are there certain qualities of light that better enable us to function? Are there proportions and perspectives that make us feel in balance and emotionally secure? (For example, having evolved in an environment where trees have a certain proportional relationship to the human body, say between 2x and 8x as tall, does living in an environment that is more vertically structured, up to 220x in height maybe, create a sense of insecurity? I wonder this as a devoted city-dweller — I love skyscrapers, but is there another level on which they are making me anxious? Would I be smarter or calmer if I lived in the forest?)

One study, done by Peter Kahn, a developmental psychologist and member of the editorial board of a new journal called Ecopsychology, suggests that natural stimuli effect our physiology in basic ways. Kahn tested a group of adults subjected to mild stress while looking at one of three different views: a window looking out over a scene of grass and trees, a 50″ plasma screen of the same scene in real time, and a blank wall. Measuring the heart rates of the subjects showed that they decreased fastest in the group looking at the real nature scene, while those looking at the TV had the same results as those facing the wall. This suggests that not only does environment unconsciously effect our reactions, but also that we can’t fake it. An authentic aesthetic experience is necessary to feel the benefits of the interaction with the natural environment.

What does this have to do with joy? Many of the stimuli we consider to be aesthetics of joy are natural and environmental. Sunlight, lushness, open and expansive spaces. The emotion joy evolved at a time in human history where there was no dichotomy between artificial and natural — before industrialization, before agriculture, when our connection to the environment meant survival. The ideas of ecopsychology — solastalgia and the idea of an ecomental system — resonate so strongly with me because of this history. Joy isn’t a result of what goes on in the mind alone; joy is an ecomental interaction, a constant dialogue between the brain, the senses, and the things we encounter in the world. It’s often said that happiness comes from within, but joy comes from without — from the impressions made by pleasurable things on our retinas, our fingertips, and our tongues, the way they disrupt the flow our thoughts and focus them on beauty and wonder. For me, this piece was an important reminder that those wonderful, natural things may be instrumental not just in joy, but in the whole of mental health — and therefore an important reminder that so much depends on our willingness to defend them.

NYT: Is there an ecological unconscious?
Illustration: Artwork by Kate MacDowell; photograph by Dan Kvitka for The New York Times

Over the past few days, I’ve been watching as the Christmas trees are put out to pasture on the city streets. For these first few weeks of the new year, it’s like an urban forest has sprung up from the sidewalks, already half-dead and dejected. And it occurs to me that it’s a good example of an object whose emotionality is transformed by context. A Christmas tree in the living room is a festive delight, a beacon in the room, a centerpiece to gather around. A Christmas tree in the street is waste wood, a symbol of extravagance and indulgence. Before December 25th, a Christmas tree is an aesthetic of joy and anticipation. After Jan 2nd, it’s trash to be dealt with, with connotations of loss and sadness. Time and place radically redefine the emotional meaning of this object.

Countless other objects experience similar emotional redefinition in our lives. The security blanket we thought we could never live without becomes embarrassing in our tween years. A precious gift from a lover becomes anathema after a breakup. A knickknack that always seemed ugly in a childhood home can suddenly seem joyful in our own. As I thought about these examples, and the Christmas tree, it reminded me of an early idea I had in my work on joy — the idea of emotional sustainability.

One of my goals with Aesthetics of Joy was to explore the emotional relationships between people and things, to try to understand how we could design things in more emotionally satisfying ways. Emotionally sustainable objects are the things that manage to stay relevant to our feelings over long periods of time, bringing joy repeatedly as we interact with them and use them. By contrast, emotional obsolescence is the quality of things that wear out their welcome, providing an initial burst of satisfaction that is not replicable. I realized early on in this project that emotional obsolescence and functional obsolescence are often out of sync, so that we have things that are broken but still emotionally valuable, and equally problematic, we have things that are emotionally obsolete but that work perfectly. Our landfills are dense with both these types of items — items with residual, unexploited value. And when we look at the problems of designing for sustainability, I think we can’t ignore that just dealing with biodegradability or disassembly or planned obsolescence is not enough. Truly sustainable design takes emotional value into account too.

It occurred to me as I looked at the Christmas tree that objects trigger positive emotion and fit into our emotional lives in different ways. Some are intense and euphoric, like a new gadget; these occupy significant but transitory spaces in our hearts. Others are joyful: they elicit strong feeling, though less intense, that comes and goes in waves. These things are repeatedly joyful throughout long periods, or even our entire lives. And then there are contentment objects — things that give us a low-level glow, a soft, pleasurably feeling of security. These objects are not the ones we desperately covet, but our emotional bond with them is durable. A antique chair or soft rug might be an example of this kind of object.

No kind of object is inherently better than any other, but just like a balanced emotional life, we need to keep things in healthy proportion. A sane emotional life has lots of contentment, some joy, and occasional encounters with ecstatic novelty. Our object lives should probably be similarly balanced. Lots of things that are soothing and make us feel good, a bunch of wonderful things that are truly joyful, that make us smile whenever we encounter them, and the occasional transitory novelty. The thing is that each of these categories of objects has different design imperatives from an aesthetic and a material standpoint. Gadgets, whose emotional character is intense but emotional life cycle is short, have the aesthetics right (sleek, sharp, and über-shiny), but the material wrong. These objects should be totally transient in their design, able to fit seamlessly back into the biological and technical cycles McDonough and Braungart propose in Cradle to Cradle. Other objects that have more lasting emotional relevance need not worry as much about end-of-life issues, but should be designed for durability, so that they can be maintained and passed on.

Misalignment between physical design and emotional character is rampant. The Christmas tree, which started me down this whole line of thinking, is a perfect example. 33-36 million Christmas trees are “produced” (um, cut down?) in the US each year, and another 50-60 million in Europe. The tree’s emotional character is joyful, its appeal recurring at the same level and at precisely the same time each year. But, its design is out of step with that character, because (practically speaking) it must be killed to be transported, and it cannot be preserved or stored. This creates huge waste. What’s needed (if we were going to design one from scratch) is a Christmas tree that lasts forever and yet shrinks down very small for storage. It also needs to have all the multisensory appeal of a real tree, and perhaps a kind of quirkiness that makes it look different every year. And best of all it would be size-adjustable, so that it could grow with a family as they move between homes over the years. Or, another way to design it might be to create a system of local tree farms that minimize transportation cost and waste, paired with a system for using the discarded trees that somehow extracts value from them.

These might be silly approaches, but the point I’m trying to make is serious — namely that emotional life cycles can serve as a guide to product life cycles, telling us what is appropriate aesthetically and materially in design. My ideas on this are still evolving, and I’d love to hear your thoughts.

{Photos via Christmas tree}