aesthetics of joy

These arresting photos of ants come via the Daily Mail. The photographer, Mohammed Babu, set up this experiment after his wife noticed that some ants had turned white from eating spilled milk. By setting up colored drops of sugar water on sheets of paraffin in his garden, Babu was able to create a palette of rainbow ants, their transparent abdomens revealing their latest meal.

There’s an interesting tension here. We’re not used to seeing insects as joyful, and usually regard them with disgust. (Though this may be a cultural response here in the West, as many other cultures do not have this response and in fact view insects as a perfectly acceptable food source.) But in this case, color seems to override our disgust, and the magic of the ants’ transparent bodies revealing the color opposes our instinct towards disgust with wonder.

When you think about it this way, there’s a powerful design principle in here. Aesthetics can create a kind of fascination that overrides our intrinsic responses, even ones as physical and intense as disgust. It would be interesting to see how this fascination could be developed to help us change behavior based on such instinctual responses – not just disgust, but also perhaps anxiety and fear. If we can design something so that it produces a conflicting response to the brain’s natural alarm bells, this tension can trigger a need for accommodation – a need to fit this new occurrence into the person’s worldview. And that need for accommodation, accompanied by delight, wonder, or curiosity, is often the first step towards a changed mind.

Photos: Mohammed Babu
Daily Mail:  ”Tasting the Rainbow”

If you haven’t seen E.chromi, you’re in for a treat. A collaboration between designers and scientists, E.chromi is an exploration in an emerging field called synthetic biology. Led by designers Alexandra Daisy Ginsburg and James King, seven Cambridge undergraduates spent a summer designing new kinds of bacteria – ones that change color in response to their surroundings, creating a kind of chromatic diagnostic tool that can detect pollutants and diseases.

We don’t often think about science as designable, and if we do, it’s usually about genetically modified produce that has sinister implications. Perhaps E.chromi will suggest another point of view, illustrating a way that biology can work with design to produce valuable new tools for society. As part of the project, the E.Chromi team envisioned present and future applications for their color-changing bacteria. These ranged from a straightforward set of detectors for pollutants in water supplies to a line of cultured yogurt drinks that indicate wellness or disease by changing the color of the user’s excrement. (Poo is not usually an aesthetic of joy, but maybe in the future?)

I love the thought of design bringing color to new places, particularly the redoubtable world of doctor’s offices and hospitals. With colorful indicator bacteria, medical tests may not be less anxiety-producing, but they at least could be de-mystified and brought out into the open. Perhaps their beauty might be some sort of salve, or at least feel more sympathetic than a line on a lab report. For preventative conditions, they might also be more clear and motivating; if high cholesterol resulted in a brown petrie dish, but low cholesterol turned things a cheery orange, maybe people would be just a little more inspired to cut back on the saturated fats.

Every application I can devise for E.chromi makes its substrate just a bit more joyful, not to mention useful. You could imagine E.chromi in the soil of houseplants, a slight tinge that would indicate the right water levels and condition of the plants. Dunking fresh fruits and vegetables in a bath of E.chromi might show you whether your produce had been sprayed with pesticides, and help you see where they are to better wash them off. People with food allergies might be able to use a fine mist of an E.chromi spray on their food before eating it (especially relevant for schools, with the rise in allergic children).

There’s design in the applications, but also the molecules themselves. The DNA sequences are composed of BioBricks, which serve different purposes in expression of the genes. One unit is a detector, which is calibrated by a sensitivity tuner that determines thresholds for the final brick, a color generator that turns the production of pigment on and off. I know it is more complex than this, but the description makes it feel akin to building a house or stacking Legos, and I find myself marveling at the range of scales on which design can impact our lives. From the tiniest microbes to the largest structures, the same processes and even the same aesthetics are at work.

What would you do with E.chromi? Does it make you feel joyful, or is it scary to you? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

For about thirty seconds after coming across this piece, “Housing Boom, if You’re a Bird,” in the NYT, I was enchanted. I read:

Recovering from a holiday of excess, I want to be in austerity mode, but I can’t help being drawn to the almost comical sense of abundance in these images from photographer Alain Delorme’s Totems series. If you’ve spent any time in the developing world, you’ve seen that these laden bicyclists are the normal mode of transportation for all kinds of goods, and it’s a source of great delight to see how cleverly the operators pile their wares onto such delicate craft. I know this is hard work, and I don’t mean to romanticize their labor, but having seen many of these kinds of carriers in person, I’ve been consistently surprised by their apparent lack of struggle. Despite the top-heavy proportions of their loads, their  balance seems remarkably effortless, and I find that looking at them evokes a sort of reverence for this almost magical skill.

On the DesignBoom blog, Andrea Chin writes:

The verticality of these formations echoes the incessant expansion of the urban area, constantly under construction. Here, De lorme gives a new vision full of humor and poetry of those porters – both super heroes and ants with impressive loads of tires, water containers, office chairs, flowers… Distanced from the typical photos of China portraying immense crowds, he has focused on the individuality of these workers, as opposed to all those identical and interchangeable objects.

While I can see the urban expansion metaphor and the emblematic reflection of the spread of materialism, it’s not the first place I go when I look at these images. For me, the reaction is much more emotional, and focuses more on the latter statement about the individuality and humanity of the workers. Unlike the numberless trucks that ferry goods around western cities, their facades obscuring their contents, each of these improvised structures is a unique composition, a transient artifact of human ingenuity. They’re less elegant than purpose-built cargo transports, but they have a kind of ramshackle beauty. Accidental sculptures, they remind me of the limitless nature of human assiduity, and the joy that lies in so many ordinary acts.

Alain Delorme: Totems
via: Erin Loechner’s lovely Design for Mankind

Were the fantastical plots by Lewis Carroll (a.k.a. Charles Dodgson) in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland a playful way of attacking new ideas in mathematics? This piece by Melanie Bayley in the New York Times gave me a sense of amazement and delight. She suggests that Alice’s rapid changes in size and proportion are a satire of mathematician Augustus De Morgan’s purely symbolic system of algebra, while the Mad Hatter’s tea party is stuck in time because the characters are obeying the principles of William Rowan Hamilton’s principles of “pure time.”

If this is true, it puts a wonderful new lens on one of my favorite joyful books. To visualize mathematical concepts and properties through the behavior of characters is such a clever way to make these ideas accessible, and to expose both their appeal and their absurdity. It’s an ingenious way of adding a layer of emotion to rational concepts, infusing a dry academic debate with charm and relevance.

NYT: Algebra in Wonderland

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

If you’ve ever wondered what a water balloon looks like right at the instant it pops (don’t you lie awake contemplating this?) — here you go. These photographers clearly have vibrant inner children!

{images: CameraShyMom, A.Connah, herbe_nelson}

Aside from babies, there really is nothing cuter in a costume than a dog. Cat lovers might dispute this, but cats are so reluctant, and their claws so sharp, and they always look so put upon. Dogs are lovably malleable and unaccountably cheerful in the face of whatever ridiculous ensemble we might devise for them.

No need to elaborate on the link between cuteness and joy (I’ve written about it here). Just head over to Flickrblog to see more costumed pooches grinning and bearing it.

Happy Halloween, and have a joyful weekend!

Xx Ingrid

Glow-in-the-dark mushrooms — another weird and wonderful innovation from Mother Nature. Seven new species of bioluminescent mushrooms were recently discovered by scientists in places as diverse as Japan, Belize, Brazil, and Jamaica.

{via Wired}

Charles Spearin finds music in the cadences of voices speaking in their usual ways. He interviews his neighbors about happiness and searches out the hidden melodies that underlie what they’re saying. Then he sets these to music.

He calls his work the Happiness Project, which you can find more info about here. Thanks for the tip, Mere!