aesthetics of joy

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}

Happy new year, everyone. I love the first day of a new year! It’s like freshly fallen snow — pristine and beautiful and no one’s had a chance to muddy it up yet. It’s full of freedom and possibility. I have to say I have a good feeling about 2010. Personally, I have some exciting things on the agenda, like turning 30, for one, and another piece of news which I’ll announce later this month. I’m also excited to keep AoJ going and growing this year. In the last few months of ‘09, my masters thesis took priority and there are a bunch of developments I’ve wanted to make to the site that I had to put on hold. January will see a nicer sidebar with a better “joyful linklist,” tighter categories and tags, and a “recent comments” section. I also want to add some “similar posts” links and generally make navigating the site a simpler, more enjoyable experience. In addition, I have a few resolutions for Aesthetics of Joy in 2010:

Praxis
In the last year I’ve concentrated on identifying and explaining joy from a scientific and an aesthetic perspective. Over the next year I really want to focus on ways of designing and expressing joy — applying all this theory to the myriad design problems out there in the world. In the end, the only way that these ideas will have any value is if we do something with them. Praxis is about putting theory into practice, finding ways to help designers of all different kinds bring joy into their work, and helping people bring joy into their lives, through aesthetics. In the beginning of this year I want to do some trial-and-error on a few ways of bringing AoJ to life, and I hope you’ll let me know what you think of them.

Interviews and guests
In 2009, I focused mostly on my own ideas of joy, synthesized from various readings and discussions. I did many interviews with a wide range of experts on different topics, but I rarely posted much about these interviews on the blog. This year, I’d really like to explore other people’s perspectives on joy, and present some interviews and guest posts on different subjects.

Testing the limits of AoJ
2009 was all about defining the essence of joy. Now I want to push the boundaries and understand the margins. I want to look at things that start out joyful but become less so over time, or things that seem unpleasant on the surface but turn out to be delightful. I want to hear counterarguments and examine outliers and puzzle over things that challenge the theories behind AoJ. What are joy’s limitations? Can joy be restrained? Can it be silent? Can it be colorless? Can it be mean, wasteful, or selfish? What is joy good for and what is it not good for? I want to understand how far we can take joy, and where joy can take us, to get a better idea of what AoJ’s role should be in people’s lives.

Practice / preach
And finally, I want to do more practicing what I preach. I’ve always had a fairly healthy inner child, but this year I’m ready to do a little experimenting on myself. First up: my quest to find a joyful form of exercise to liven up my routine. Any suggestions? Let me know.

Now that you know my new year’s resolutions, what are yours? Any joyful ones? What are you most hopeful about for 2010?

Image: pamhule (CC)

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

Holiday gift-giving is usually a source of joy. But on the NYT Economix blog yesterday there was a piece that considers the flip side. A new book by Wharton economist Joel Waldfogel called Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays, lays out an argument that gift-giving is full of economic loss. Essentially, the argument goes that since the decision-making on what to buy as a gift is a step removed from the user, the matching of needs/wants and objects is inefficient, and therefore wasteful. (Waldfogel has some empirical data to reinforce his claim which you can read more of here. Perhaps he also has a bunch of relatives with particularly bad taste…?) It’s fair to say that you rarely receive as a gift the things you’d buy yourself, but does that necessarily mean that holiday giving is a deadweight loss?

In the Times piece Harvard economics professor Edward L. Glaeser offers a counterpoint. He suggests that the act of giving imbues objects with value beyond the material or utility of the item; presents become valuable as signals of affection. The object given may not be exactly what the giftee desires, but the fact that the giver took the time and effort to select it makes the receiver feel loved. In Glaeser’s view, the diminished use value is more than compensated for by an increased emotional value.

Economics has much more trouble with emotional value than with use value. Emotional value is messy and mercurial. It changes not just from person to person but from day to day and from mood to mood. A spoon is basically as good at its job today as it will be tomorrow. Not so with a trendy gadget, a piece of jewelry, or a prom dress. Emotional value is the reason you can feel both vexed and enchanted when you unwrap a hand-knit sweater from Aunt Gladys on Christmas morning. The object is both utterly worthless and totally priceless. It’s also why unwrapping a gift certificate is enjoyable, yet vacuous. It offers the freedom to satisfy your true desire, in a package that shows that someone didn’t spend much time thinking about you. Bummer. In essence, both Waldfogel and Glaeser are right in their ways. Gifts often do entail a deadweight loss — we often receive things we have utterly no use for — and yet they are also indispensable components of social interaction. A gift that feeds only the soul is still valuable. And for the rare gift that manages to be both a signal of affection and a perfect match for the recipient’s needs — perhaps that quantity and durability of value compensates for many other gifts that fall a little flat.

Waldfogel’s solution is to stop the practice of gift-giving altogether. But gifting would be nearly impossible to give up. Not only is the behavior deeply entrenched across cultures, but there’s also some research suggesting the behavior is hardwired into our human nature. Glaeser suggests we make it easier for gifts to be exchanged and returned. I’d offer another suggestion: giving more gifts with handmade, personal components. By investing more of your time and effort in the gift, you increase the item’s emotional value. At the same time, you may find you spend less money on things that would be mismatched to the recipient or undervalued. This year, one of my favorite Christmas gifts was just this kind of gift: two beautiful framed prints of my best friend Annie and me as kids. (As you can see, we were basically inseparable.)

Though other gifts I received this year may be more exciting or more needed or more exactly matched to my wishlist, none is more special. And long after all the pleasure and satisfaction has been wrung out of my other gifts, these will still be on my wall, making me smile.

Image (top): handmade gift tags by Sarah, and available on Etsy, (in case you happen to be a little late with some of your own holiday gifties!)

Weirdest thing.

The other day when my laundry came back, I opened the bag and started to put away my clothes, and there in amongst the hand towels I discovered this little guy. A hitchhiker! He was just sitting there, hanging out, as if it made all the sense in the world that he should be there. To be honest, it was kind of creepy at first. An unexplained intrusion into my mundane evening, with vaguely magical undertones.

I had to figure out how he got there. I wondered if maybe he was a gift from the laundromat, a holiday thank you for my business. But when I called to ask, the woman had no idea what I was talking about. (Not a normal query, granted: “An elf. In my laundry. Did you put it there?”) As far as I could tell, she thought I had received someone else’s garment by accident and she asked me to return it next time.

So he must have arrived by accident. I looked it him more closely. Cute gnome. He’s made out of beautiful felt and pipecleaners and wool yarn. He doesn’t look like he’s been through the laundry — so it’s not one of those situations where he got stuck in the lint filter like a sock and emerged in the next load. It’s a mystery.

What’s wonderful — and for me, joyful — about this kind of mystery is that while I know there’s a rational explanation for the gnome’s appearance, it’s hidden from me. The gnome is felt and yarn and wire — it’s made of matter and must obey the laws of physics. Wherever it came from, it had to take a tangible path to get here. Perhaps it fell out of a crafter’s purse or pocket while she was shifting her sheets from washer to dryer, adhered to the laundress’s sleeve by static cling, and made its way into my bag. But I don’t know that story — no one does — and for me the gnome’s past is a giant ellipsis. This would be a nonstarter if the item were a sock or a teddy bear. But it’s an object that takes a form with a built-in magical narrative. Gnomes, elves, fairies are the stuff of myth and lore. If anything has a plausible reason for mysterious behavior, the gnome is it. The gnome roams, as we learn in Amelie and those Travelocity commercials — it appears in places, without taking a journey to get there. Just like my gnome. In a way, it’s a silly and trivial happening. But I wanted to share it because I think it provides an interesting example of the alignment between magical narratives and magical aesthetics.

For the meantime, I’ve decided to keep him. When I was working at Landor in Sydney, my coworkers and I used to joke when we were overwhelmed that we needed a magic gnome to handle the extra work. Well, right now I have ten days until I present my research on Aesthetics of Joy for the first time, and there are lots of loose ends to tie up. I could use a magic gnome. As my mom says, sometimes things find us. And right now, my gnome just makes me feel like the mysteries of the universe are working in my favor!

*** Please bear with me if posts are sparse over the next two weeks as I complete this last leg of my masters. I will be back in force come December 14th, with lots of photos of my latest joy-inspired furniture pieces and many thoughts I’ve been saving up to post. Thanks for reading!

xx Ingrid

I can’t believe I missed these at Halloween. Street artist Diabetik was placing these traffic cones on streets around the DC area.

Here is a great example of something that walks the line between joy and joke, and I think comes out on the side of joy. This is something design wrestles with a lot. A joke is something whose pleasure declines over time, usually sharply. I’m thinking of all those cutensils, the little kitchen cartoons that hang from your faucet or the side of your teacup and were amusing the first time you saw them and now are just kind of annoying. They’re one-liners, and once you’ve gotten the punchline, they become ponderous.

Joy, on the other hand, is something you feel over and over again. It doesn’t get old — often it gets better with time. Joy is carried by aesthetics; it stimulates the senses, not just the funny bone. So even if there is a punchline, as in this case when you make the connection between cone and candy, or the wordplay on cone and corn, there’s a deeper level of sensory pleasure that comes from the aesthetics. If these cones were painted red, orange and turquoise, the joke wouldn’t be there, but you’d still feel a sense of delight at the unexpected hit of color and stripes.

Jokes and joy often come together, and because of this many designers confuse the two. Many designers see humor as a route to joy, but they don’t realize that to embody a joke in material without a reinforcing aesthetic experience is irresponsible. A joke that falls flat on stage harms no one. But a joke injection-molded in plastic, manufactured by underpaid workers in poor conditions, shipped to people all over the world, and discarded the next week or month or year is flat-out criminal. If you want to design jokes, go ahead — but don’t mass-produce them. Make a prototype or a computer model and send it around the web. Show it on YouTube and share it via Twitter. But if you want to design things for people, then make them joyful, or contenting, or stimulating, or awe-inspiring. Make things whose aesthetic properties support the emotional quality you want to evoke, through color, texture, form, density, sound, smell, movement. Before you expend precious matter and energy in the expression of an idea, ask yourself, will it still tickle you ten years from now?

If not, spare a thought about the costs of making it. And think about ways you might design it to be more emotionally durable. Aesthetics of joy is often just about the simple pleasure of these wonderful, renewable experiences. On the blog I like to highlight beautiful, joyful things and talk about why they are so. But at the heart of it all is the idea that through more conscious attention to aesthetics we can move away from one-liners towards these more lasting experiences, away from emotional disposability towards emotional sustainability.