aesthetics of joy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a good thing on this blog when something like consensus emerges, and so many of you have sent this my way that it seems we all agree: This is joyful!

An interactive installation at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art by the self-described “obsessive artist” Yayoi Kusama, The obliteration room offers a whitewashed home interior as a blank canvas for children visiting the museum to cover with colorful dots. It’s a joyful exercise in participatory art, in abundance, in layering and accretion. Visitors leave their traces on the space. Their experience of the exhibit becomes manifest in the exhibit. And through the innocent randomness of children’s choices, a pleasurable kind of order emerges. The impulses to cover and to cluster — to cover and conquer a new white space or to cluster around a social crowd of others — make the distribution playful and human.

You wonder about the title: obliteration room. Obliteration feels like a word of violence, of emptiness and destruction. How does this jibe with the impetus towards joy? I believe what Kusama is after here is a kind of transcendence. Though the dot has always been a motif in her work (a childhood portrait of her mother shows it covered with polka dots), these vast fields started to become most prominent in her “happenings,” public events designed as protests to the Vietnam War, where people would gather naked to be painted with dots. As Kusama writes in her autobiography Infinity Nets:

Polka dots, the trademark of “Kusama Happening.” Red, green and yellow polka dots can be the circles representing the earth, the sun, or the moon. Their shapes and what they signify do not really matter. I paint polka dots on the bodies of people, and with those polka dots, the people will self-obliterate and return to the nature of the universe.

The polka dots are unifying; they transform individuals and bodies into a larger being. In that process, the self is “obliterated,” so that this sublime feeling of unity can be obtained. You know it if you’ve been part of a synchronized dance, sung in a choir, or participated in another kind of expression of collective joy — for some moments, you cease to be you-in-the-world, and you become an element in a larger organism, a symbiotic cell in a web that sustains and is sustained by you. In this process, pattern and repetition are intensely powerful mechanisms of transcendence (more on this here).

What about the dot itself? Kusama says the shapes do not really matter, but I don’t believe her. The shape of the dot is the cell; it’s the module upon which the whole system is built. A brick of a charcoal is not a block of ice because the atoms of their essence are different. The dot is the atom of the pattern, and it matters. Kusama describes the significance of the dots in her book Manhattan Suicide Addict:

…a polka-dot has the form of the sun, which is a symbol of the energy of the whole world and our living life, and also the form of the moon, which is calm. Round, soft, colorful, senseless and unknowing. Polka-dots become movement… Polka dots are a way to infinity.

There’s an elemental quality to the circle, a primal symmetry that makes it naturally joyful. Roundness connotes safety, invites touch and play. (More on the joy of circles here.) Which brings us back to The obliteration room, which is at its heart deeply playful. Kusama is a heady woman, and there’s a darkness at the root of much of her work (she suffers from hallucinations and lives by choice in a mental institution near her studio in Tokyo), but what I love is that play and joy rise up through these struggles to become the overriding impression of her work. What Kusama achieves in her work is perhaps the greatest transcendence of all: the transformation of pain into joy.

Part of a larger exhibit of Kusama’s work (much of it joyful) called Look Now, See Forever, The obliteration room is on view until March 2012. Thank you to @benbob2u, @jacobyryan, and Liz McCarty for the tips.

For more kids and Kusama, check out this joyful video of a child’s delight at discovering one of her dot rooms.

Via: This is Colossal.
Images: the first four from Queensland Art Gallery and photographer Mark Sherwood, others from Stuart Addelsee, and heybubbles.

In the busyness of the holidays, sometimes it’s hard to find time to stop, breathe, and take note of joyful moments. Slow down for a minute with some tiny things:

Artist Dalton Ghetti carved this amazing alphabet on pencils. Odd but lovely. {via Odd Stuff Magazine}

Many small pleasures beat a few larger ones. (More reason to indulge in tiny sweets!)

Bees have feelings, too. New research in Scientific American suggests these remarkable little insects have an emotional life.

Silly little art project, low-fi and delightful: Single Lane Superhighway. Go draw a car. It makes you feel a part of something. {via @alexandrapulver}

“It was like finding little gems.” Photographer David Liitschwager captured all the living creatures within a cubic foot in a variety of different climates to draw attention to the abundance of denizens of a swath of habitat that “could fit in your lap.” National Geographic. {via The Guardian}

Stay sane this pre-holiday week. Try not to rush through, but find the beauty in the craziness, and savor it!

Last week I was interviewed for this great piece on the trend towards “tiny sweets” by New York Times writer Julia Moskin. In the article I try to demystify why it is we’re attracted to mini-canolis or Baked by Melissa cupcakes (above) and talk about the “Alice in Wonderland effect,” where big changes in the scale of objects around us, either tiny or huge, make us reconsider our scale in relation to the world in a joyful way.

For more, check out past posts on tiny sweets, giant sweets, and the joy of miniaturization.

NYT: “Small Wonders”
Image: Tony Cenicola/New York Times

Stick bombs. Did you know such a thing existed? This is totally something I would’ve been building as a kid (along with those extremely satisfying domino chains) had I known it were possible. I put a lot of stock in this kind of play: mundane objects elevated by creativity. It’s through these kinds of hands-on explorations that we learn the forces that govern the world, both their limits and their potential.

The best part is the kid’s tutorial about how to make a stick bomb. I especially love the distinction between a “baby cobra weave” and “the other kind of weave.” Send it along to all the kids in your life with a pack of jumbo* popsicle sticks, and get cracking!

*Don’t forget to get the jumbo kind, otherwise it will be really really really really really really hard!

Amidst numerous disappointments for me in the redesign of the New York Times Magazine, there is one thing the new editors got very, very right, this being the presentation of Mark Bittman’s wonderful Eat column. If you’ve been exposed to Bittman through his Minimalist column, or his myriad cookbooks, you know that he stands for beautifully real food, simply prepared. He is a voice for restoring the place of cooking among the palette of basic skills possessed by all adults, and his adroitness at balancing elegance with ease in his recipes makes his body of work an important entry point for those “too busy to cook.” His philosophy of approximate measures, devotion to high quality ingredients, and embrace of the seasonal and sustainable have inspired me on more than one occasion, and so it’s a joy to see his recipes matched by visuals convey their exuberance.

Bittman’s organizing principle is theme and variation. The theme is of the moment: heirloom tomatoes, asparagus, pasta primavera, lobster. It is a carpe diem call, an urging to revel in an evanescent largess of some kind. It is rooted in abundance, a perennial theme of Aesthetics of Joy, and this is what we see brought to the forefront in the visuals. The theme unfolds in variations, typically four movements, that burst with color and possibility. It has become a weekend ritual for me to eagerly anticipate the column, tearing through the magazine to find this page, and add it to the collection on my fridge door. (It’s worth noting that it is nearly as lovely in the online version – in some ways more so, with more emphasis on the food.)

I find these arrays irresistible, and I can’t overstate what a victory I believe this is for real food. In the modern age of mass production, comestible abundance has been claimed by Big Food, by double cheeseburgers and all-you-can-eat buffets, by the Big Gulp and the Venti latte. Aesthetics of abundance are especially prominent in confectionary. It’s the “taste the rainbow” of Skittles, which overflow their boundaries in the ads, an industrial bumper crop. It’s the giddy experience Willy Wonka, vivid M&Ms, everlasting gobstobbers, and Mr. Softee with hundreds and thousands. The association between sugar and joy and abundance is primal – it derives from harvests, and our genetic predisposition to take advantage of excess while we have access to it. Waste not, want not.

But the ecstatic sugar-high has overshadowed the natural abundance available from real food, the kind that comes from a farm, not a factory. It excites me to see an aesthetic treatment that imbues real food with this feeling of plenty. After all, we eat with our eyes as much as our mouths, and for all our best intentions, there is an unconscious craving for muchness.

If there is thing I hope people take away from this blog, it’s that things are easier to change than people. And changing things often leads to changes in people. It may seem trivial, but I see the Eat column as an example of design used to outsmart our cravings, to realign our desires with the needs of our bodies in a contemporary context. I hope this is just the beginning of Aesthetics of Joy in the food revolution.

Now go make yourself some corn and blueberry crisp and savor these last days of summer!

Images: Heirloom tomatoes Yunhee Kim for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Deborah Williams. Layout from Margaret & Joy’s gorgeous food blog. Asparagus Yunhee Kim for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Deborah Williams. Fruit desserts Yunhee Kim for The New York Times. Food stylist: Megan Schlow. Prop stylist: Deborah Williams.

If you’re anything like me, your first reaction on seeing the above was “What is that?” – a question fueled by equal parts wonderment and curiosity.

Since my recent post on the idea of a color language, inspired by Hyo Myoung Kim’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, I’ve been seeing color languages all around. These prints, above and below, by graphic designer Laia Clos of Barcelona’s Mot Studio, explore a color-based translation of musical notation. SisTeMu, as the notational schema is called, relies on simple geometric forms and colors to make a piece of music (in this case, the lead violin of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons) tantalizingly visible. How intelligible it might be is another matter, but for the way it dimensionalizes the experience of music, I find it captivating.

Music is one of the most visceral of art forms, capable of evoking intense emotions without a descriptive or narrative thread. It is pure abstraction. Can you imagine opening up a playbill at the philharmonic to find a set of visuals like this inside? It would be so wonderful to try to follow the measures along. I love how the variations in the scale and color of the bubbles create an instantaneous sense of tempo and intensity – it’s a synesthetic experience of sound.

This piece, from Eugene Ysaÿe’s Sonata Nº5 is so wonderfully varied. I think I like the visualization even more than the Vivaldis. Which made me wonder, would I like the music better as well? And, I think I do. Wouldn’t you like to see the below as an animation with the piece?

I especially love the stamps for each of the seasons, which are like melodic snapshots. Sonic triggers, in visual form. Both the stamps and the posters are available on Clos’s site, here.

Another color language discovery comes via Anna of the awesome Birds of Ohio blog. She pointed out to me the work of artist Lauren DiCioccio, who, like Hyo Myoung Kim, translates text into color, albeit with a softer, more organic style. These pieces, which DiCioccio calls her color codification dot drawings, take pages from popular magazines such as Vogue and Vanity Fair and reinterpret them in color using a painstaking process with a mylar overlay. She describes them as a kind of “Braille for the color-inclined.” They feel to me almost like an impressionistic language. Poetry, Seurat-style.

Stephanie Posavec’s Writing Without Words similarly explores reading as an experience that is about more than content. Zooming out – way out – Posavec’s visualizations of books function like a Powers of Ten for literature, giving us a visual image of the structure we sense intuitively as we work our way through a book. This first image shows the chapters of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, broken into paragraphs and sentences, color-coded by theme. Rhythm Textures, below it, visualizes sentence structures with words as radiating circles, pauses in white. I love how the seeds of all these patterns are visible in the highlighted versions of the manuscripts that Posavec used in constructing these studies.

Posavec’s First Chapters, below, is especially fascinating to me. This set of visualizations (only a subset of which is shown below), looks at the first chapters of famous books to illustrate the writing styles of different authors. Line length is based on sentence length, so tighter drawings suggest shorter, crisper style, while looser, more open sketches indicate a more languid style. Could there be a more perfect juxtaposition than Faulkner and Hemingway? Expansive vs. economical, loose loops vs. a tight knot – there’s a real joy in seeing these styles exposed through a system.

Much of the work of both DiCioccio and Posavec seems to concern the visceral and immersive quality of reading and grapples with the fading of this pleasure as so much of our reading now moves onto devices. These color languages, all print projects, manifest the craving for a more emotional, less efficient experience of reading (or listening, as the case may be). After all, a color language is illegible* in terms of content, but emotionally, it is fecund. It simultaneously slows the process down and makes it more immediate, refocusing our attention on the sensorial aspects of narrative, obfuscating content to illuminate meaning.

On the other hand, these projects also make me wonder if the move to devices might hold the possibility of making reading more sensorial, rather than less. True, for me there is no more exquisite literary sensation than the aroma of a good book, whether it’s the musty smell of an aged classic or the pungent, chemical tang of a new one. But imagine being able to see these sentence structures or thematic progressions visualized alongside or overlaid upon your text in an e-book. Reading would be both linear and non-linear, abstract and concrete, intuitive and literal all at once. Through the design of the book, or the e-reading software, we could discover the joy of a completely new and beautiful understanding of the craft of writing.

Finally, before I close, I want to highlight just one more color language, also from Posavec. This piece, from her 11x series, looks at mathematics through the lens of form and color. I figured there had to be someone out there translating numbers into color, and though I found Posavec’s work through the meta-narratives above, I was excited to discover these pieces, which visualize her fascination with “long multiplication and other types of handmade calculations” and unlock the “hidden beauty in the cascading lines of digits in this method of multiplying numbers.” Maybe there’s a seed of an idea in here about education, working between the modes of learning – verbal and visual, mathematical and kinesthetic, musical and spatial with translations that make the innate order and beauty of a process legible to the others. Through simple aesthetic delight, perhaps math problems become accessible to the numerically illiterate, or music becomes sensible to the tone-deaf.

{Thank you @issue and Anna for the inspiration for this post.}

*Incidentally, there’s a reason for why a color language would be so much harder to read than standard human languages. Neuroscientist Marc Changizi writes in his book The Vision Revolution that the reason we read so easily is because our letterforms evolved to look like natural objects, (or more correctly, parts of objects) which our brains are primed to process quickly because they surrounded us in our ancestral environment. Reading a text is then very much like reading a landscape. Our letters look like they do because our brain is fast at processing edges and contours, which hold information about an object that could be urgently relevant to our survival, but slower at processing stimuli less urgently relevant to survival. (Is that a cliff edge or a gently sloping hillside? A tiger’s sabre tooth or a ripe apricot? The fastest way to know is shape.) Our letters are not colors because such a detailed level of color identification is not as urgent a mental task; the systems for “reading” color are just naturally slower, (though colors hold lots of intrinsic emotional significance… a topic for another post).

They look almost like brightly colored mosses, don’t they? Like some new form of street lichen. Or a kind of chromatic filling compound. A rainbow grout.

This set of sculptures by artist Juliana Santacruz Herrera is a particularly striking example of yarnbombing, a form of knit or crochet-based street art that frequently reacts to the urban environment. In Herrera’s case, this means applying braided fabric in looped forms to cracks in the sidewalks of Paris. Like the pothole gardens and lego repairs I’ve written about in past posts, Herrera’s works use delight to call attention to the breakdown of infrastructure in the city. Like other yarnbombing projects, they work with maximal contrast – in color, contour, density, and texture – to catch our eyes and make us take notice. While they don’t actually fix the problems they’re addressing, it’s possible that inducing this kind of positive affect makes people more inclined to act to change their environments. More than an angry letter or a protest, these works create a desire to share with others, creating a kind of social momentum.

Herrera’s works are one more example of a phenomenon I call joyful repair – the act of mending or calling attention to a damaged element of the environment using color, texture, playful gestures, and other aesthetics of joy. It’s a form of joyful activism, which tries to bring about change through positive emotion, and it’s one of my very favorite applications of aesthetics of joy.

Here’s another example I’ve had in my files for awhile. Working at a slightly smaller scale, London artist Ben Wilson uses chewing gum splotches as a canvas for tiny, brightly colored sidewalk art. Wilson has been creating the paintings since 1998, and estimates he’s made over 10,000 of the little works! Interestingly, not long after he began his gum-painting endeavors, people began making requests for particular designs, often commemorative. So what began as litter has become an odd little system of tribute, like plaques on park benches or in front of newly planted trees. People want to be associated with something they feel good about, and with a little color and charm, that even could be improperly discarded chewing gum. The sidewalk at first seems an unusually mundane place for this sort of personal connection, but maybe not. After all, the sidewalk is the most intimate of transitory spaces in a community, the backdrop for so many of our daily dramas and spontaneous joys. Filling its holes, reclaiming its blemishes – in some way these are a deeply integral form of reconstruction.

There’s something else here, too. Projects like this are a signal that someone cares about a place, that the condition of that environment matters to someone. Someone is paying attention to the details. To make something beautiful is to invest time and energy in it, and these two are the most valuable, limited resources we have. We perceive this signal of caring and passion, often unconsciously, and we typically follow in kind. We read our landscape for cues about how to treat it, we draw inferences about the inhabitants, and we subtly alter our behavior to maintain this condition – or enhance it. These aesthetic signals often become a discourse of community, a conversation between the denizens of a place that leads, via a subtle form of one-upmanship, to the organic growth and improvement of our favorite places to call home. Alain de Botton has written (I’m paraphrasing here) that one of architecture’s purposes is to inspire us to be better people, and I would say the same for any of these urban interventions. We see improvements, and they unconsciously motivate us to improve ourselves.

Joyful repair projects can serve as jumpstarts for this process. This project, though not new, is a great example of this principle applied over a large scale. Called “Favela Painting,” this brightly colored village is the work of Dutch artists Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn. Working in a slum outside Rio, their goal is to use art “as a tool to inspire, create beauty, combat prejudice, and attract attention.” The care and passion embodied by the murals effectively transforms the favela from outside in. Some really thoughtful words about the effects of this project, on the Magical Urbanism site:

‘Favela painting’ affects the aesthetic order of how favelas are perceived from within and outside its natural embryonic growth. Colour brings hope. It brings a different understanding of space and its people, inviting others to co-create and co-represent much more constructively and positively life here. It appeals to our senses in a way that we do not reject but embrace these places and the potential for better life. It articulates a different discourse of social change; of engagement, contributing to improve life for favela dwellers.

It’s hard to say it any more succinctly than “color brings hope.” It suggests energy, and as such it has an uplifting and an attractive power. It’s a harbinger of better things to come. As I think about the phenomenon of joyful repair, I’m reminded of the root of the word repair, the Latin parare, “to make ready.” By repairing things, we are making them ready again. By repairing them joyfully, we’re making them ready for wonderful things to happen in the future.

Images: Juliana Santacruz Herrera on Flickr via designboom; Ben Wilson via Inhabitat; Favela Painting via The Fox Is Black.

{Thank you Maggie and BD}

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

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?

Really love this work by SF-based artist Leah Rosenberg. The pieces are made from sheets of acrylic paint layered over time. Stacked, they look like water-curled pages of old books, dyed in technicolor. The paint becomes form, rather than just surface. She writes:

My paintings are time and process-based works that combine elements of layering, systems of accrual, and color. I allow and encourage the build-up of paint to act in a three dimensional manner, at times to the point of doing away with the support altogether. These layers of paint function as a way to mark the passage of time, but also reveal the paints’ inherent materiality as it begins to take on its own shape. I select the colors based on personal systems, sometimes based on the text from a book that I am reading or lyrics of a song, other times reflecting a telephone call home to Saskatchewan, or the colors of the clothing worn by people who visit my studio throughout that day.

I love this idea of the shape of time accrued — the way each layer is a visualization of a moment, a chunk of time distilled into color and given shape by the ones that follow. Like a sedimentary rock in luminous, abundant color. And, not to overthink things too much, the pieces just look so wonderfully tactile.

Leah is having a show in SF at 18 Reasons, 593 Guerrero St., which opens Thursday, May 13. If you’re in the Bay Area, check it out (and send me some pictures, will you?).

Ice cream trucks from around the world! What is it about trucks that lend themselves so readily to decorating?

via Let’s Color

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?

I’m loving these new offerings from the brilliant duo behind quirky housewares company Alice Supply Co. The new nautical color scheme gives the plungers a kind of Dr. Seussian vibe — like the long tail of the Cat in the Hat. The ping-pong paddles are particularly inspired to me. While they don’t fall under the core mandate of housewares, they’re a natural opportunity to add joy to the mundane through color and pattern. Somehow, dressed in stripes, these paddles seem like they should always have looked that way.

Personally, though, the items I’m most coveting are the hammers. If I had a hammer like these, everything would be a nail!

Taking a momentary break from self-imposed writer’s isolation period because I could not resist sharing this. Did you know that joyful mobile-maker Alexander Calder also designed jewelry? Of course, he’s designed many joyful things, besides mobiles — his Circus for one, which was at the Whitney last year, and a variety of toys. But it was a delightful surprise to me to learn that he created about 1800 pieces of jewelry in his lifetime, many for his wife, Louisa.

I love the radiating gestures of the pieces — like a sun, stars, or fireworks. Also, isn’t it interesting how the image of Louisa’s dressing table (below) kind of looks like a mobile?

{via Birds of Ohio}

Wonderful project by Rachel Berger. Every day for 100 days she chose a color swatch at random from a bag, and wrote a short piece (like a prose haiku) inspired by it. I love how it exposes all the random connections that color and language form in our tangled brains. There are the aesthetics of joy in the world, but then there are also the aesthetics of joy inside us — embedded in the network in our neurons, the experiences of our cells, the sensations still living on our fingertips, and the pattern of thrills that has shaken our bones. Sometimes it can be hard to access them, but then a chance encounter with a color, aroma, or evocative sound can bring them right back to the surface of the now.

{via DesignObserver}

I’m taking a holiday from the blog this long weekend to focus on last-minute details for the thesis. Happy Thanksgiving, and see you Monday!

xx Ingrid

I love how the stripes feel like they’re coming to life in these colorful tape installations by artist Rebecca Ward.

{via @design_sponge}

I’ve been saving up these color wheels for just such a gray fall day as this one. I present my thesis just 3 weeks from tomorrow, and while daylight is short the workdays are definitely getting long. Of course, it does help that the work I’m doing is so upbeat and colorful. Just looking at happy images has powerful unconscious effects on mood, creativity, and energy. These color wheels are like a shot of caffeine to the arm — the perfect late-mid-week boost!

Above, {via}

These thread and quilt color wheels are by my favorite fabric-and-yarn store combo, Purl. They sell fabric bundles to help you recreate the quilt above.

Above, lilfishstudios

Above, Andy Gilmore, who I first wrote about here.

Don’t have a source on the two above — apologies. If this is you, let me know.

And finally, the toy I’d most like to see under the tree if I were four years old (and if Pottery Barn hadn’t discontinued it):

If I had a set of these cheerful chopsticks from DWR Tools For Living, my takeout bill would be steep! Though I guess I could offset the cost with noodle dinners, as these would make even dollar-store ramen into a joyful experience.