aesthetics of joy

I spend a lot of time looking for joyful things to write about — but sometimes they just manage to fall into my lap. I arrived back from Japan to a note from Emmanuelle Moureaux, a Tokyo-based French architect who works with colors in stunning ways. (I’m particularly enamored of this design above, for the Sugamo Shinkin Bank in Shimura, which she describes on her site as a “rainbow mille-feuille.” Isn’t it just exactly that?) It kills me that I missed seeing her work in person there, but I thought she’d make a great “Joymaker” profile, and she kindly agreed to answer a few of my questions. As you’d expect from looking at her work, she has a deeply thoughtful, intentional approach to working with color. Here’s what she had to say.

How do you want people to feel when they encounter your work?
“Color” is the concept of all my works. With colors, I design new concepts, new atmospheres which will give emotions to people. I use colors in order to give emotions.

What is the role of color in your work?
I use colors as three-dimensional elements, like layers, in order to create spaces, not as a finishing touch applied to surfaces.

When I first visited Tokyo, I was shocked by the city brimming with colors. Bright colors overlapping and intermingling with each other, buildings with different volumes and layers of electric cables forming the cutout sky. To my eyes that grew up in a town made of stone, they appeared beautifully like a painting. I want with my design people feel emotion as I felt when I saw the beautiful colors of Tokyo.

I also feel in the city of Tokyo a sense of layers (buildings with different volumes, electric cables, signboards… overlapping like layers in the space). This layered structure of Tokyo gives me the feeling of depth.

These two elements (colors and layers), inspired by Tokyo, are the basis of my design. “Colors” and “layers” are expressed in a concept I develop in all my projects, the concept of “shikiri”, a made-up word literally meaning “dividing (creating) space using colors” in English. The colors, detached from two-dimensional walls or other surfaces, seem floating in the space and structure it. For example, in the Sugamo Shinkin Bank / Niiza Branch, “squares of colors ” floating in the space structure it, giving it its form and depth. For the Tokiwadai Branch, “leaves of colors” play the same role.

Ed. note: I absolutely love that so many of these projects are banks, places we think of as dry and corporate. (And pretty much the last place you’d expect to find a rainbow!)

“Shikiri” is a colorful partition series, inspired by the Japanese traditional sliding screens. Sliding paper or wood partitions used in the past in all the Japanese houses have almost disappeared now. I feel sad to see these very functional and beautiful Japanese traditional sliding screens fading away now days, so I continue to bring out the essence of the old, and turn them into something modern and practical, which still can be used today. I am trying to reintroduce them in a different way with the concept of “Shikiri”.

If you were a color, what color would you be?
Multicolor : I never use one color but always combine several colors.

What are some objects that symbolize joy to you?
Color palettes (Pantone etc…), color samples (color acrylic, color textile…)…  Everything which has a lot of colors in the palette makes me happy.

What is one project hiding in your sketchbook that you’d love to build one day?
“Shikiri house”: its concept is defined so I would like to build it. Also, there are very strong relations between the products I design (better to call them “mini architectures) and architecture. Stick chair, shibafu table are designed as buildings. Puzzle box too. Toge would be the structure for a building…. So I would like to realize them in a big scale.

I could only post a small fraction of Moureaux’s joyful work here — there are so many more vibrant works on her site. See more here. Incidentally, her thoughts on Tokyo color mirror my reactions to the place, which I posted last week. See here, if you missed it.

Images: courtesy Emmanuelle Moureaux

A few months ago I wrote about the Hypothetical Development Project, a collaboration between Rob Walker, Ellen Susan, and G. K. Darby to create “imagined futures” of abandoned buildings, expressed through mock architectural renderings. Over on Places, Rob Walker now has a great piece relating the story of the project, as well as its role in the context of architectural fiction. (The piece also quotes some thoughts from the original Aesthetics of Joy writeup.)

On the surface, design fiction is an odd concept. Design is a functional discipline, a craft driven to make ideas tangible, to concretize solutions into usable forms. Design operates on the principle that by distilling imagination into form, it becomes truth. People can dislike a thing, dispute its purpose, disagree with its intentions – but they cannot deny it exists.

On the other hand, fiction is a lie. A welcome and seductive lie, perhaps, but still a non-truth. And the subject of a lie does not exist beyond the world of its own narrative. So within “design fiction” there is a tension – between tangible and ephemeral, existence and non-existence, imagination and reality. Walker rightly points out that many of the architectural renderings we see are just this kind of designed fabrication. (Many are created as marketing gestures, but the projects they show are never funded and therefore never built.) In this sense, they are less lies, and more, as I noted in my original assessment, manifestations of hope and desire. Unable to predict THE future, they instead try to depict A future, a kind of illuminating untruth. What is illuminated? As Walker points out, both something in the abandoned structure, the forlorn substrate of the fiction, and in the viewer themselves.

The moment that interests me most, I suppose, would be the random passerby who suddenly notices that building he or she has walked past a hundred times, just because there’s this sign on it, this arrestingly uncanny sign that tells a story that’s blatantly and intentionally absurd. I think that moment — the story, in one image, of an implausible future for an unpopular place — makes the building exist again in a new way. It changes nothing into something.

I think it makes the passerby exist in a new way, too.

The role of designer as storyteller is not a new construct in the design world, but I think this project gives it new resonance, or at least reminds us that the value of conceptual design (even absurdist conceptual design with no hope of being made real) need not be subordinate to the design of the functional here-and-now. Design fiction gives us places to go. It highlights features and flaws. It expresses wishes in a voice much nicer than a whine. In some ways, it is a necessary precursor to “real” design, if we want that design to represent progress, and not just continuation.

I say all of this as a former fiction writer, one with great respect for the simple joy of a story told for its own sake. While as a designer I am tempted to look for a practical application for Hypothetical Development, as a writer I’m happy for it just to just contribute to the general joy of our surroundings. As Walker writes, “…I don’t think a story needs to be considered a means to an end. A story is an end. And a sign on an abandoned building is as good a medium as I can think of for telling an entertaining tale.” The beauty of design fiction is the way it fuses the storyteller’s art with the evocative palette of the form-crafter. It’s a rich space, and if I take anything away from the project, it’s that many, many entertaining (and inspiring) tales are waiting to be told.

Places: Implausible Futures for Unpopular Places

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?