aesthetics of joy

In the summer of 1997 I went to Switzerland. I was seventeen and awed by everything there: the impossibly green mountains, the richness of the food, the brightly colored money. But by far the most magical experience I had was ice skating through a cloud.

The peaks of the alps are so high that clouds at times will huddle in small hollows on a mountain’s surface. (Little do we suspect, from a distance, this intimacy between clouds and mountains – that despite their seeming aloofness they are passionate lovers sharing high-altitude secrets.) In the town of Leysin, the skating rink sat in one of these catenaries, past the town on a downslope. A covered structure, open on the sides, the rink was positioned so that a breeze would draw wisps of cloud through the space. We looped through them, in and out of the whiteness, enchanted.

To be so close to a cloud, to be literally inside it, is a fleeting kind of joy. Artist Berndnaut Smilde brings something like this to galleries, carefully controlling the humidity and temperature to bring real clouds into being for a few minutes. Watch this video to see the process in action. Indoors, the cloud seems to be many things at once. It’s a luminous piece of sky, yet also an interloper. It feels more precious than it would “in the wild.” And yet it also feels out of place, confused even, like a lamb split off from the flock. It teeters on the edge of joyful and eerie, a conjurer’s trick that we embrace cautiously, with visceral awe.

Joyful and eerie: it’s an odd pairing. How is it possible that joy can come to us bound together with fear? And what determines whether what we end up feeling is wonder or trepidation?

It’s a contradiction many have wrestled with. The philosopher Edmund Burke called it the sublime, and wrote of conflicting impulses towards attraction and fear. Psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Dacher Keltner describe it as awe, an emotion combining the perception of vastness or great power with a need for accommodation, a need to understand the phenomenon and bring it into line with our worldview. Awe creates an awareness that something forceful is at play, something with uncertain mechanisms and consequences, and our natural instinct at encountering such unknowns is to feel fear. But because we are human and inherently opportunistic, and because we are not certain if the unknowns are threatening, we also feel curiosity. It is a state of repulsion and attraction all at once.

Aesthetics have a big say in which force wins out. Imagine you are standing in a field, alone and far from shelter. A great black cloud-like apparition looms on the horizon. It is coming towards you, and doing so abnormally fast. How do you feel? Now imagine yourself in the same field, but replace the cloud with a colorful double rainbow. How would you describe the difference in how you feel? Both are strange events, both vast, both require accommodation. But through the color, form, and mass of each, your unconscious assesses threat level and tips your emotional state towards anxiety or towards wonder.

It’s easy to see why we would feel awe and fear at potentially dangerous things – this feels sensibly adaptive. An emotion that primes us to take cover has probably saved enough necks to earn its right to a spot on the genome. But why have wonder? Why have an emotion specifically attuned to things that are strange and intense, yet benign?

I believe we have wonder because it lets us know when the laws and limits of our world have been transcended, and opens the way to new frontiers of possibility. Wonder is a signal that there has been magic in our midst. It pokes a hole in our worldview, and tempts us to investigate, becoming a powerful spark for curiosity that paves the way towards new discoveries.

As a culture we tend to undervalue wonder, but the craving for it is deeply valid. It is not a distraction from purposeful work – it may instead be the catalyst for starting it. A desire to witness magic is an impulse towards the expansion of the mind, towards the improvement of the human condition. At the root of our love for rainbows, comets, fireflies, and miracles is a small reservoir of belief that the world is bigger and more amazing than we had dreamed it could be. And if we are to be creative and hopeful, then feeding this reservoir is vital.

So go look for impossible beauty, implausible joy. Seek it out even if it doesn’t seem to have an immediate purpose. And then just be curious. You don’t have to control wonder; you only have to seek it, and be open to what it shows you.

Via: Smilde’s Nimbus II spotted by @brainpicker

Images: from here and here

Are any of you feeling like this year took off at a gallop and hasn’t quite given you time to find your seat in the saddle? You can blame my recent quietude on that and Downton Abbey. (I quit cable only to be seduced by Dame Maggie Smith and WWI drama on pbs.org. But I digress.)

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about birdsong. It started with this TEDtalk, in which Julian Treasure talks about the psychological benefits of birdsong. You know birdsong feels uplifting intuitively, but do you know why? The explanation is so sensible you’ll smack your forehead when I tell you. It’s because birds chirp when things are safe, and go quiet when there’s danger. So for thousands of years birdsong has been a subtle background signal that tells us, unconsciously, that we’re safe. Just because we don’t typically rely on that cue any more doesn’t mean our brains aren’t still wired for it. Though it’s an anachronism for many city dwellers, it’s still relaxing. And if the birds’ tones are particularly pleasant, they might even spur a sense of joy.

This is just one example of biophilia, a theory developed by E.O. Wilson postulating that humans have a natural, evolved affinity for the natural world. According to the theory, all kinds of natural stimuli can have a positive effect on wellbeing. (More here.) There’s a spike in research on this topic, and birdsong is among the aesthetic elements being researched. In the UK, the Guardian reported on a new study that will study effects of birdsong on people over the next three years. Eleanor Ratcliffe, the researcher conducting the study believes birdsong could also have effects on productivity and creativity.

Another question up for exploration: Does birdsong have the same effect when recorded? Sample of one reporting here, but I think it could. Earlier this week I downloaded the free Birdsong app for iPhone and have been listening in the mornings while getting ready for work, and it definitely perked me up. (Soundtrack to this post provided by the birds in my Brooklyn backyard recorded last spring. Bonus for birdwatching readers who want to tell me what species are hanging out back there.)

Delving deeper, research has shown that birdsong contains fractal patterns, suggesting some underlying symmetry in the sounds themselves that is pleasing to us. Fractals are intricate patterns that repeat themselves infinitely at different scales. Fractals can be found in coastlines, clouds, snowflakes, and blood vessels, as well as many works of art. (Jackson Pollock’s paintings have been analyzed and discovered to have fractal dimensions.) The authors of a paper on fractals and beauty, Alex Forsythe and Noel Sheehy, write:

It is thought that fractals tap into specialist cognitive modules that have developed to modulate information about living things, and that such modules are linked with emotional regulation… Hagerhall et al. reported that viewing fractal patterns elicited high alpha activity in the areas of the brain concerned with attention and visual spatial processing (the frontal lobes and parietal area).

Allow me to translate: Research suggests that our brains respond unconsciously to fractals, regarding them as information that gives us critical insight about our surroundings, and tell us how to feel them. We don’t need conscious knowledge that fractals are involved. Regardless of our awareness, we sense an intuitive order that gives us comfort. In fact, the authors note that studies have shown fractal patterns can reduce physiological stress. Another primal, comforting sound – the human heartbeat – also has a fractal dimension, and the more fractal it is, the healthier it is likely to be. So, perhaps birdsong actually has a kind of symmetrical microstructure that speaks to us through these hidden neural pathways. And perhaps tapping into its tones and rhythms could help create soundscapes that can counteract some of the stress of hectic, noisy modern lives.

As our favorite Portlandia crafters know, looking at images of birds doesn’t hurt either, and I love this series by photographer Paul Nelson, featured in an exhibit called Sky and Sea put on by Lux Archive at The Natural Wine Company in Brooklyn. It’s wonderful to see the birds set apart from the world, aloft. (Even better to know none were harmed in the shooting – Nelson uses a specialized rig to capture the ethereal images.) The exhibit runs until May 9.

*Correction: The original version of this post misidentified the site of the exhibit. The exhibit is at The Natural Wine Company, not the Lux Gallery (if such a place even exists!)

Happy new year from Iceland!

Beginning a new year in this magical place has me brimming with energy and excitement for the year ahead. It’s been a beautiful and comforting trip, filled with new discoveries, friendships, and moments that simply took my breath away. I have thousands of photos to sort through, and stories aplenty to share with you in the coming days.

I feel restored in a way I haven’t felt in a long time, and this trip has afforded me many chances to reflect on what gives me inspiration and energy to compose and create. As I look back at 2011, I realize that at times I was guilty of living through my laptop, instead of placing myself in the circumstances of the joys I write about, and writing from the feeling. There are times for self-discipline, but that can have its own inertia, and it can lead to writing by brute force, rather than affection. Coming to Iceland, in search of light and magic, was an inspiring way to start a new habit. It will not always be international adventures (if only!), but in 2012 I’m resolved to spend lots more time outside the studio. I hope Aesthetics of Joy will be better for it.

Through the vicissitudes of work and life, across time zones and seasons and continents, I find myself ever grateful to have found such a solid source of happiness in writing this blog. I’ve met more kindred spirits through Aesthetics of Joy than I believed existed when I started. (New Year’s Eve was a perfect illustration of this, but more on that to come.) Thank you for the joy you’ve brought me in 2011, and here’s to even more joy for you all in 2012. Gleðilegt nýtt ár!

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.

Seems it is a week for thinking about time. Perhaps it’s the heat, which slows the afternoons to a thickness, reminding us of the elasticity of hours. Or perhaps the long days of summer leave us more light to read and think. Whatever the reason, in the past few days for me have brought a confluence of aesthetics of time.

This visualization is a fitting place to start. A piece by the designer Nicolas Troncoso, Colordar represents the average temperature of Helsinki over the course of 2010 by color. There is something satisfying and joyful about seeing the year represented this way, the intensity of the summer and winter tempered by the mildness of the transitional seasons. Of course there is a natural relationship between temperature and color, evident in the way we refer to colors as cool and warm, that makes this visualization feel perfectly natural. It is another type of color language, akin to the ones I have written about in the past, distilling the ambience of time. It might be fun to do this with other geographies (equatorial, desert, polar) as well, nested as concentric circles for comparison, to see space, temperature, and time all at once.

If color here is an output of our experience of time, in other ways color serves as an input, a language that communicates time to our body and brain. We know that the color of light changes through the course of the day, the short-wave bluish rays of the early hours giving way to the longer wavelength light that gives the sunset its rosy hue. But what research now suggests (as reported in a recent article in the NYT) is that these color signals are the basis for our body’s regulation of Circadian rhythms. In other words, our eyes tell time by color.

As the color-receiving cone cells in our eyes absorb different wavelengths of light, they regulate the production of melatonin, a light-sensitive hormone that controls our alertness. (Melatonin is often indicated as a natural remedy for jet lag.) We’ve long known that melatonin levels vary based on exposure to light, but recent research shows that the color of the light makes a dramatic difference. In one study at the University of Basel in Switzerland, thirteen men were asked to sit in front of a computer in the evenings before bed. Both groups of participants sat for five hours in front of a computer screen. But one group looked an old-style fluorescent monitor emitting a range of colors of light from the visible spectrum, while the other group looked at an LED-backed monitor that emitted twice as much blue light. For the blue-light group, melatonin levels took longer to rise, and stayed lower throughout the evening. Other studies have found similar results, one indicating that men exposed to bluer light had melatonin levels 40 percent lower than those exposed to incandescent light.

These discoveries force us to question the consequences of our increasingly illuminated world. As we replace our old CRTs and incandescent bulbs with more efficient light sources, we’re also inadvertently increasing our exposure to the bluer light these devices emit. And as we introduce more and more screens to our world, we add still more blue light to our days. (Through this lens, reading by the cozy glow of an iPad or Kindle is very unlike reading a book with a bedside lamp.) If the world communicates time by its color, our devices speak to our bodies in tongues.

This may be alarming news, but there’s also a positive story here. Blue light increases alertness, and has been shown to have effects on cognition and alertness. One study showed that elderly nursing home residents exposed to just 30 minutes of blue light showed improvement in cognitive abilities in just four weeks. This could be useful from a design perspective, for everything from helping shift workers manage their schedules to promoting alertness for those operating vehicles or machinery (a fact called out to me by Dr. Charles Spence, the director of the Crossmodal Research Lab at Oxford University). Even for sleep-deprived office workers, better lighting could mean more energy and a break from the need for caffeine. One of the researchers behind these studies, neurologist George Brainard, hopes that designers will rise to the challenge and get to work on creating screens and lights that adjust their wavelengths to reinforcing our natural rhythms.

In the end, I come back to the mechanism itself, and the latent poetry of it. Light is merely energy, and blue light, with its short waves, is high-energy luminance. Vibrating and alive, these rays excite the molecules of pigment in our retinas, a revelie that calls our cells to the attention of the day. There’s a beauty in this energetic language, one that reminds us that blue has an inherent joy. Though typically perceived to be a calming color, blue is revealed by these studies to have an intensity we don’t often give it credit for. The brilliant sky of a clear day moves us with a force that speaks directly to the chemistry of our blood. We are helpless to resist. And why would we want to? It’s a primal kind of delight, and we are made for it.

{via @brainpicker and @vaughanbell}

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

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

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

I 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”

Awhile back, the website Science and Religion Today asked me to write a short piece on the topic of aesthetics of places of worship, and I thought about some of the ideas in that piece when I saw these amazing images of vaulted ceilings from the book Heavenly Vaults, by David Stephenson. I realized I never posted the piece in full here, so I thought I share these ideas from the archives:

People seek many different things in a spiritual experience, a fact attested to by the variety of religions and rituals practiced around the world today. But if there’s one motivation that all faiths seem to share, it’s a desire for transcendence — a wish to rise above mundane concerns and commune with a higher or more complete entity. When we worship, we look to shift our perspective away from the trivial towards the big picture, to put ourselves in context of a larger whole. Can design help us do this?

In short, yes. Design won’t make believers out of atheists, but it can certainly provide conditions for deepening the experience for the spiritually inclined. Researchers studying awe, an emotional state closely linked to transcendence, believe that a key trigger is a sense of vastness. Encountering objects or spaces that are extremely large in scale, from Ayer’s Rock to the Grand Canyon, stimulates what psychologists call a need for accommodation — a need to take this new experience and fit it into our existing mental models, stretching them in the process. As our mental models struggle to accommodate the power behind works of great scale (both natural and manmade), we feel smaller by comparison. Our focus broadens, which effectively minimizes our daily preoccupations. The builders of the great cathedrals, the Angkor temples in Cambodia, and Easter Island’s famous moai statues all understood, whether explicitly or intuitively, the power of great scale to inspire this perspective-shifting, spiritual sense of awe.

Scale can be particularly effective when the exaggerated dimension is height. Earthly existence naturally has a vertical orientation, defined by the gravitational force that holds us to the earth. Upward directionality is associated with lightness, air, and spiritual thoughts, while downward brings connotations of heaviness, earth, and physicality. Some religions conceptualize this vertical dichotomy as a moral one, with heaven above earth and hell below it. And many religions conceive of the spirit as a weightless entity, which is freed upon death from its gravity-bound body. Defying this downward pressure by turning our gaze upwards naturally leads many of us to a more spiritual frame of mind. Structures that are upwardly expansive feel more conducive to worship than those with low, dark ceilings. This effect can be enhanced by adorning the ceiling with elements that cause the gaze to drift upward, such as lighting fixtures, ceiling frescos, or skylights.

Turning the gaze upwards has another effect: it allows more light into the eye, and light is another aesthetic element that can enhance our spiritual experience. Light is a common metaphor for deities and a proxy for their blessing. In Genesis, God’s first act after creating heaven and earth is to proclaim “Let there be light.” When a religion wins a convert, they say he has “seen the light,” and the object of spiritual quests is “enlightenment.” Many early religions, such as those of ancient Egypt and Greece, featured gods of light or sun as primary deities. It makes sense that light would be so prominent a feature in worship, considering its significance to our survival. Light was certainly on the minds of gothic cathedral builders when they developed the practice of using flying buttresses. By taking pressure off of the walls, these exterior structures allowed for taller, lighter cathedrals with vast expanses of glass windows that were previously impossible. Structures of worship are at their most sublime not just when they’re bright, but when they call attention to the light and focus our gaze on it. Stained glass windows are one way architects of religious structures have done this. Others work with natural light. A particularly beautiful example is Osaka’s Church of Light, designed by Tadao Ando. The cuts in the expansive structure shape the light, giving it form and presence. The result is an expansive space with a transcendent glow.

Surely there are other aesthetics more specific to different religions that can enhance the experience of prayer and spiritual contemplation. Features such as the structure’s shape, color treatments, and level of adornment all vary according to belief systems. But these three elements — scale, height, and light — seem to have deep roots in human nature or cultural practice that make them particularly conducive to achieving spiritual communion. Can you pray meaningfully in a dimly lit, undergound cave? Surely the answer is yes. But an expansive, well-lit space is more likely to put you in a prayerful mood.

Images: DesignBoom
{via}

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!)

There’s something pleasurable about a good pattern, and it’s a pleasure all out of proportion to reason. Pattern is just arrangement, not content; it lacks the inherent meaning and immediacy of pure sensory pleasures, like buttercream frosting or dappled sunlight or the first crunchy bite of a ripe apple. And yet, pattern has tremendous emotional significance, at times irrespective of or even in contrast to the content it holds. Simply the act of imbuing order creates delight.

To experience this, you need look no further than the aptly named Things Organized Neatly blog, which showcases all manner of random objects upon which various kinds of order have been imposed: color spectra, grids, size hierarchies, taxonomies, pairings, tesselations, stacks, and so on. It’s a catalog of order, and of the ways in which order can transform ordinary objects in enchanting ways. A set of paint-dipped spoons, a few feathers, some mismatched number 2s — any of these objects would be unremarkable alone on a flea market table, but together, in their arrays, they’re evocative and compelling. Even objects that normally evoke emotions like fear, anger, disgust — objects like fish parts, knives, and guns — become joyful in this neatly organized world.

That the content can be arbitrary makes order an intriguing aesthetic of joy. It’s an aesthetic of process, rather than substance. Actually, as I write this, I’m reminding myself that all aesthetics concern process, when it comes down to it. Aesthetics are results of different kinds of processes — of growth, of fabrication, of movement, of selection, or of arrangement — and they reflect these processes in their forms. Order, a product of the last two, is a manifestation of balance, a sense of harmony between elements that transcends the quality of the individual objects. It’s about the forces between modules, rather than the modules themselves. Order gives the content emotional significance; in fact, we could say that by becoming the dominant feature to which our emotions react, order itself becomes the emotionally-relevant content.

But what kind of content? Why does order stimulate contentment, and even delight?

We humans are natural pattern-finders. Our brains revel in discovering order, and they do it even when no actual manipulation of objects is involved. With the volume of data being received through our senses at any moment, an ability to find a meaningful signal among the noise is one of the brain’s most essential functions. Order begets pleasure because order creates a canvas that allows us to identify disorder, and the opportunities or threats it could connote. As a species, we thrive and die by the extraordinary, so systems for finding it are intrinsic to our survival. One researcher describes this drive as patternicity, and points to a study that demonstrates that evolution favors an over-inclination to assign patterns to the world around us. (This tendency is so pervasive, our brains often even manage to find patterns where none exist — and it makes sense we do so even more when stressed, when the brain is on heightened alert for threats.) This patternicity extends to aural stimuli, as well as visual ones. Studies have shown that infants have an innate understanding of the concept of beat, and will react with surprise when a regular series of tones is disrupted. And of course, in music, the pattern or organization of tones is as much a determinant of the emotional content as the tones themselves, while the ability to discern these patterns is a major source of the pleasure of listening to music.

Many thinkers have expressed the joy of order, as they have observed it or felt it intuitively. Alain de Botton writes, “The drive towards order reveals itself as synonymous with the drive towards life.” Pearl S. Buck observed that “Order is the shape upon which beauty depends.” And perhaps a bit more abstractly, the biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, who had such a keen eye for order in nature: “The harmony of the world is made manifest in Form and Number, and the heart and soul and all the poetry of Natural Philosophy are embodied in the concept of mathematical beauty.” I love the word harmony, a more emotional interpretation of the more sober order. Harmony connotes a certain rightness, balance, and intrinsic pleasure that come from things that have meaningful relationships to each other. And I’m struck by the mention of soul in Thompson’s observation; we tend to think of soul as unbound, free of the confines of predictable order, so there’s a wonderful tension in the idea that the mathematical world of order can also offer soul.

Collecting is another manifestation of this desire for order, and a seemingly universal human behavior. I believe that we collect things to find patterns, often through objects that link together moments in our lives. Collecting, like all forms of pattern-finding, is a narrative impulse: Our things tell better stories when thoughtfully arranged. This may explain the oft-misunderstood delight of the collector, at finding an unusual button or butterfly. It is another link in the chain, a module in a story that is not so much invented as curated, assembled from ordinary-looking dross into a pattern of joy.

For more, check out Things Organized Neatly, as well as A Collection A Day, both blogs that showcase the joy of order. The last two images were republished on Things Organized Neatly from Homemade Is Best, a baking cookbook from IKEA. They’re amazing, probably deserving of a post of their own.

Well, I’m back after a longish, unscheduled break. Let’s call it a summer (working) holiday. But wow, did I miss it. I don’t plan on taking this much time away from the blog again for a long time. There are just too many interesting and joyful things to write about…

Before I launch into some thoughts on the things I’ve been reading and observing in the last few weeks, I want to just say a quick thank you to everyone who has commented, sent me an email, or sent me links recently. This summer has left me breathless, and I haven’t had a chance to respond to everyone yet, but rest assured that I will, and that I appreciate the kind words, the thoughtful recommendations, and the healthy debate you bring to my inbox. Thanks!

On my mind today are the aesthetics of nature. A big part of my thesis for Aesthetics of Joy is that joy evolved to guide us unconsciously towards things that would have been beneficial for our survival (or more accurately, the survival of our genetic material). It stands to reason that since during the bulk of this evolution humans were nomadic creatures living in an environment with far more trees than skyscrapers, natural environments are going to be replete with stimuli that make us feel joyful. Bright sunlight, ripe fruits, wide open spaces—these primal joys hold clues that give context and meaning to many of the things that delight us in the modern world. And as the research supporting evolutionary theories of psychology continues to accumulate, the evidence suggesting the connection between aesthetics of nature and our wellbeing is beginning to mount.

On his Frontal Cortex blog, now on Wired.com, Jonah Lehrer has a great discussion of some findings from the emerging field of ecopsychology, which looks at the relationship between nature and the mind. (I first wrote about this field of research in February, here.) One study, dating back to the mid-1990s, looked at female housing project residents, some of whom were living in apartments facing city streets and basketball courts, and others who had views of a grassy, landscaped courtyard. The women were tested on everything from attention to their ability to cope with life’s challenges, and those with the more natural view tested better on nearly every measure. Similarly, in a 2008 study led by Marc Berman at the University of Michigan, students who were given time to walk through a park before taking a series of tests performed better on measures of attention and memory than those who had walked through city streets.

According to psychologists, views of nature are restorative. They seem to allow the brain to reset and concentrate again. This reminds me of an insight noted by Chip and Dan Heath in their book Switch: Willpower, they observe, is finite. When you expend a lot of effort trying to control cravings, desires, or emotions in a certain situation, it can be draining, leaving you with little energy to control yourself in others. I wonder if there’s a similar mechanism going on here. Functioning in urban environments takes a lot of mental energy. It requires high alertness, and it’s sensorially complex; there’s a lot to process. I wonder if views of nature provide a reset because they are simply easier on our brains, evolved as they are for processing the stimuli in this environment.

This may be, but it’s not the whole story. Another study, also cited in the article on solastalgia I quoted in my February post, adds another piece to the puzzle. The study, conducted by Peter Kahn, took participants and stressed them out with a series of math tests, and then gave them one of three views to look at: a window facing out onto a tree-filled view, a plasma screen of the same view, and a blank wall. Those looking at the natural scene had the quickest stress reduction (measured by a decrease in heart rate). Those looking at the blank wall had a much slower return to normal heart rate. We could’ve predicted that. Subjects who looked at the nature scene and the plasma screen both looked at their views longer than those looking at the blank wall. Also a no-brainer. But surprisingly, the subjects who looked at the plasma screen showed virtually the same stress-reduction pattern as those looking at the wall. So while we’re drawn towards a views of nature to relieve our stress, it has to be real nature. It’s not something we can trace to one aesthetic element—like the color green or the contours of the leaves—and bottle it. It’s the full multisensory, immersive aesthetics of nature, all together, that foster wellbeing and joy.

Apparently, the kind of nature matters too. Lehrer’s post mentions another study that demonstrated that people who spend time in parks with a greater diversity of plant life score better on tests of psychological wellbeing than those who spend time in less biodiverse parks. A patch of grass may be green, but it’s not nature. A diverse park is more like nature, naturally, and probably a lot more like the environments in which our brains grew up. Variety, as much as greenness or leafiness, is an aesthetic of nature, and it seems it does us a lot of good.

Another fascinating insight about our brain and nature comes from an interview with Mark Changizi, an evolutionary neurobiologist whose latest book explores new research on human vision, on the Neuronarrative blog. Changizi observes that one of the reasons its so easy for humans to read (those of us who are literate read thousands of words in a day) is that our letterforms mimic natural shapes. He suggests that if our words looked like barcodes or fractal patterns, we would not be able to process them nearly as quickly. He says:

To be easy on the eye, writing needs to “look like nature,” just what our illiterate visual systems are fantastically competent at processing. The trick of that research direction was making this “writing looks like nature” idea rigorous, and coming up with ways of testing it. I show that there are certain signature visual patterns found in nearly any natural environment with opaque objects strewn about, and that these signature patterns are found in human writing. In short, writing has evolved so that written words look like visual objects.

I have to pause to marvel at the beauty of this insight, which is nothing short of thrilling for readers, writers, and typographers all. But as the awe subsides, I wonder if this fascinating insight holds a clue to applying aesthetics of nature to design in ways that really do foster our wellbeing. I’m sick of seeing wallpaper that looks like birch trees or tables with grass growing in the middle put forth as design’s  solution to the urban condition. Can’t we do better? As the plasma screen experiment demonstrated, a picture of nature isn’t going to cut it, and while it’s certainly a fine idea to have some plants around, I think we could go about “bringing the outside in” in a more sophisticated way. Perhaps there are visual patterns or spatial arrangements that better mimic a natural environment, design ideas that can be applied to urban planning, architecture, interiors, and products to provide some of the same benefits. It’s encouraging to think that we may be on the cusp of learnings that will help us bring more aesthetics of nature into our citified lives.

Of course, there’s another implication here, not for the design of a home necessarily, but maybe for the design of a lifestyle. Get outdoors. Do it often and especially when you’re stressed. Because no matter how well we’re eventually able to design to mimic nature, there’s no substitute for the real thing.

I’ve been wanting to do a post on illusions for a while now. There’s something interesting to me in the way illusions create a sense of wonder, revealing magic in seemingly ordinary images and forms. Illusions can also be somewhat unsettling, forcing us to accept that our usual standard for proof — “I’ll believe it when I see it” — is not always so reliable. This tension, between wonder at the impossible and subsequent distrust of our faculties makes illusions a fascinating area of exploration for aesthetics of joy. What determines whether an illusion brings joy or anxiety? And why are we so transfixed by illusions in the first place?

I started thinking about a piece on illusions after receiving an email about a new public installation (above) by the artist Felice Varini in New Haven, presented by Site Projects. The name was familiar, but I didn’t know his work; after a bit of exploration, I discovered that Varini specializes in the creation of a particular variety of trompe l’oeil illusion. The artist paints a large-scale graphic shape on three-dimensional surfaces so that when viewed from one particular spot, there is an illusion of a two-dimensional graphic superimposed on the scene. It’s hard to explain, but easy to understand if you look at these images or watch this video.

Trompe l’oeil (meaning “trick the eye”) illusions  like this can be particularly satisfying because they involve the demonstration of artistic skill. Usually this skill is used to create depth where none exists; Varini flips the convention on its head and creates an illusion of impossible flatness. To watch how he does this is extraordinary (see this video) because it is just so simple. Using projected light, he is able to identify and fill in the essential surfaces for his enormous illusions.

As often happens when you get an idea in your head, you start seeing instances of it everywhere, and suddenly I found myself surrounded by illusions. I attended a wedding in Santa Fe and found this installation on a wall in that city’s history museum. (The second photo shows how it works.)

Then Scientific American Mind magazine released a special issue on illusions, featuring over a hundred different examples, noting, “Illusions push the mysterious and wondrous brain into revealing its secrets.” And shortly thereafter I ended up at a SciCafe event at the Natural History museum here in New York only to hear astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson weigh in on the subject. As he waxed philosophical about the limits of human intelligence, he inquired, “Why do we call them optical illusions? We should call them brain failures!”

There’s an interesting tension in those last two views, both perspectives from science. Are the effects of illusions a demonstration of the brain’s wondrous workings, or are they evidence of its foibles and failings? Perhaps both. As neuroscience researchers Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. Macknik observe in SciAm Mind, “Although our sensations feel accurate and truthful, they do not necessarily reproduce the physical reality of the outside world.” We trust the inputs from our senses when faced with conflicting information about something in the world. If we see an elephant but someone tells us we’re looking at a giraffe, we trust our eyes more than our companion. But when information from our senses conflicts with understood laws of nature, such as in this illusion (below) where a printed graphic appears to be moving, we become aware of the limits of our brain and our senses. Illusions are like test cases at these outer limits of perception. They reveal the boundaries of our brain’s ability to interpret the world in our minds, but in doing so, they also reveal just how successful the brain is at that task of interpretation most of the time.

Am I off-topic here? What does any of this have to do with joy?

I think there is a strong connection between magic and joy: when the world presents us with an experience that is somehow impossible, implausible, or inexplicable by intuitive logic. Magic implies a contradiction inherent in the world. It brings joy when it’s non-threatening (otherwise it breeds anxiety) and when its secret is obscure enough that it can be re-experienced again and again. Optical illusions perform this kind of magic. Even when you know what kind of trick the illusion is playing with your brain, you cannot prevent yourself from experiencing it, which leads to a particular kind of rediscoverable wonder. Illusions are particularly fruitful for design because of this rediscoverability. They are more than visual jokes; they are satisfying even when you know the punchline.

The reality is that the magic of illusion is not evidence of a contradiction in the world. It’s a contradiction somewhere between the world and our own minds. They are lost-in-translation moments, “brain failures” in Dr. Tyson’s parlance. But our ability to find ways to play with these quirks at the margins of our perception has made them delightful failures — an accidental, yet beautiful sort of aesthetics of joy.

Felice Varini images courtesy of Site Projects. Installation will be up until June 2011.

For those who may not have seen via twitter, I’m very excited to announce a new collaboration with Core77 — I’ll be writing a monthly column on the site, starting right now! My first piece is actually more about design and psychology more broadly, but it relates to the unconscious effects of aesthetics that I often write about here on the site. Here’s an excerpt:

If you want to convince someone about something, you’d better give them a soft seat.

This is one design implication coming out of a surprising new set of studies that examines the relationship between our sense of touch and our attitudes and decisions. The studies looked at the unconscious associations between aesthetic elements such as texture, hardness, and weight, and found that by exposing subjects to these elements, researchers could elicit different responses to the same social questions and tests.

For example, study participants who sat in a soft seat and were asked to negotiate with a car dealer made far more generous second offers than those who sat in hard seats. The hard seats literally made them more rigid. Similarly, when volunteers were asked to read and evaluate a story about an interaction between a supervisor and an employee, the ones in the hard wooden chairs viewed the boss as stricter and more rigid than the ones who sat in soft, cushioned chairs. In another experiment, participants who had just put together a puzzle with pieces coated in rough sandpaper were more likely to find a story of an ambiguous social interaction to be difficult and adversarial than those who had put together a puzzle made of smooth, varnished pieces. Harsh textures evidently prime us to think harshly. Other related studies have shown correlations between temperature and social attitudes (proving the intrinsic truth behind the phrases “warm fuzzies” and “cold pricklies”), between weight and perceived seriousness, and between “clean smells” and moral behavior.

Click here to head over to Core77 to keep reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts, and know about other topics you might like to see covered in this new forum. Thanks for reading!

A few months ago I wrote about the architecture of worship — about how elements like elevation, light, and scale create a sense of awe that supports transcendent, spiritual joy. These elements are common to holy places: churches, temples, and mosques, as well as many spiritually significant natural spaces.

This morning, as I was reading The Architecture of Happiness (this is inspiring a lot of thinking at the moment), I came across a discussion of another aesthetic element that might stimulate that wonderful perspective shift we associate with religious joy: pattern at scale. Alain de Botton writes:

Muslim artisans covered the walls of houses and mosques with repeating sequences of delicate and complicated geometries, through which the infinite wisdom of God might be intimated. This ornamentation, so pleasingly intricate on a rug or a cup, was nothing less than hallucinatory when applied to an entire hall. Eyes accustomed to seeing only the practical and humdrum objects of daily life could, inside such a room, survey a world shorn of all associations with the everyday. They would sense a symmetry, without quite being able to grasp its underlying logic. Such works were like the products of a mind with none of our human limitations, of a higher power untainted by human coarseness and therefore worthy of unconditional reverence.

In prior posts, I’ve talked about pattern’s ability to create a sense of abundance, through a visual illusion that uses surface to mimic volume and quantity. This matters because we are innately drawn to abundance, and the aesthetic abundance of patterns such as dots and stripes seems to satisfy a vestigial hunger in our primal mind. Trained to the cycles of glut and privation, we crave quantity as a bulwark against an uncertain future.

But what about the type of pattern that de Botton is talking about — pattern so vast and so staggering, it creates an abundance almost incomprehensible to the human mind? At these orders of magnitude, dazzled by a supernatural abundance, our minds struggle to reconcile the scale of what we’re witnessing with the boundaries of our experience. We measure this new experience against the possible, the normal, and the likely; in each case, our existing mental models are challenged and stretched, causing us to wonder about how this experience came to be. We also face this conflict, between a new experience and our mental models, at encounters with great scale (Grand Canyon), great force (a thunderstorm), great talent (a passionate aria), or great good fortune (“miracles”). For the spiritually inclined, religious belief becomes a way to accommodate an amazing new experience, to explain it and the feeling it triggers within us. For non-believers, though the explanation may be different, the aesthetic awe and resulting joy is there too. It is joy at its mysterious best.

There is also, as de Botton observes, a transporting effect played by pattern at scale. The patterns that line the insides of mosques, like the colored light from stained glass windows, create a world apart. They are immersive and enveloping, jolting the mind away from mundane concerns and holding them at attention. In this way, they function not just as context for worship but a tool of it. Like a zen Buddhist koan, the endlessness of pattern dazzles and contains our restless minds, leaving them primed and open for transcendence.

In case you missed it, this Idea Lab visualization from Sunday’s NYT Magazine made me smile, and made me think.

It’s interesting to me the way aesthetics can transform the emotional tenor of content. Though the subject matter has a negative slant (partially genuine, partially comic), the circular shape, colors, and stripes emanating like rays of light from the center make the whole thing kind of delightful. But why? I think it’s because our emotions react to aesthetics before they process content. Even when the aesthetics and content are dissonant, the aesthetics guide our reactions, I guess because in most circumstances, aesthetics are an accurate shortcut to understanding content.

What are other good examples?

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?

This seemed appropriate for today, given it’s my birthday. A new study finds a correlation between smiling in photos and longevity. The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, looked at photos of Major League Baseball players taken prior to 1950, and correlated smile type (none, partial, and full or Duchenne) with years of life. A player with a Duchenne smile was half as likely to die in a given year as a non-smiler, suggesting a clear potential longevity advantage.

In their interpretation, the study’s authors suggest that smile size is indicative of an underlying emotional condition, which in turn reflects general health and well-being. They write:

A growing body of research has shown that basic emotional conditions, such as happiness and sadness, generate differentially patterned autonomic responses (Ekman et al., 1983; Levenson et al.,1990), which influence physical and mental well-being and longevity (Danner, Snowdon, & Friesen, 2001; Maruta, Colligan, Malinchoc, & Offord, 2000; Peterson, Seligman, & Valliant, 1988). To the extent that smile intensity reflects an underlying emotional disposition (Ekman & Friesen, 1978), the results of this study are congruent with those of other studies demonstrating that emotions have a positive relationship with mental health, physical health, and longevity.

I also think there’s a counter-loop here, where joyful moments make us smile more, and the autonomic responses triggered by those moments create physical conditions that are favorable to well-being. People who naturally smile more may find an easy road to a long, happy life, but is it possible that consciously bringing more smile-worthy moments into your life can impact longevity? I don’t know, but there’s a wonderful thing about this question — it certainly can’t hurt to try.

As a side note, I’d be curious to see how a study like this would work in a country where smiles are notably muted or repressed due to social convention — such as Japan, a place well-known for longevity.

Image: me + my best friend Annie as kids, Duchenne smiles in full display
{via: @swissmiss}

Recently, the website Science and Religion Today invited me to answer an intriguing question: what architecture or design works best for places of worship? I shared a few thoughts with them on aesthetic elements that tend to put people in a spiritual frame of mood, regardless of religion. Read my answer here.

What is your favorite place for spiritual communion? Why? I would love to hear your thoughts.

Image: Osaka’s Church of Light, designed by Tadao Ando. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home…. Maybe it is a good things for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always later, so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it. For a house that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to the house we were born in, would lead to thoughts—serious, sad thoughts—and not to dreams. It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.

— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

I’ve been dreaming about this house, on the island of Elliðaey in Iceland, since I saw it here. Apparently the house was a gift from the government of Iceland to singer Bjork for raising the country’s global profile. Then I saw this quote by Bachelard and started to feel a little better about the fact that I don’t live in it. I may never get to live in anything quite as remarkable as this, but I find great joy in the houses of my daydreams, and it makes me wonder if sometimes there isn’t as much joy in desiring as possessing.

My latest post for my Psychology Today blog is generating a lot of great discussion in the comments about architecture and emotion. The post uses the phenomenon of the blog Unhappy Hipsters, which assigns new captions to photos from Dwell and other design magazines, as a springboard for questioning the emotions evoked by modern design aesthetics. I argue that there are ways in which modernism is fundamentally in tension with the aesthetics of joy, particularly when it comes to angular forms, desaturated color palettes, and minimalist or restrained tendencies. Though it sounds as if I’m a modernist-hater from the premise, if you’re a regular reader you know that’s not the case. In fact, I’ve posted on the opposite topic — confluences between modernism and joy — more than once before. The post was inspired by the old adage, “it’s funny because it’s true.” I was curious if the humor in Unhappy Hipsters stemmed from a larger, mainly unconscious issue with modern design. The post was an attempt to provoke some reflection on some of the salient features of the style/ideology of modernism and why they might be at odds with positive affect. I’m heartened to see the level of debate and thought in the discussion, and I’d love to hear your thoughts as well.