aesthetics of joy

Joymaker is a new series spotlighting people who seek to create joy in their work.

It takes a kind of joyful madness to hand-apply 100 lbs. of raspberry jam to a gallery wall. And that’s exactly what attracted me to the work of Naomi London, a visual artist based in Montreal, who tries to bring a voice for joy and play to contemporary art. London uses joyful forms, visual metaphors, and textures (such as polka dots) to give her audience a sense of delight.

I’m fascinated by the shiny, sticky surface of this enormous red wall. While a red wall might typically take on a violent or alarming quality, the material makes it totally disarming, even childlike. I wonder if it stayed sticky throughout the installation, and slightly fluid, shifting its mottles in a slow gravitational creep towards the floor. Or whether it stayed firm, drying like a giant fruit roll-up. I didn’t ask Naomi these silly questions, but I did ask her some others:

How do you want people to feel when they engage with your work?

I’m very interested in the notion of play in art. I’m hoping that when people see the Jam Wall they can appreciate the unexpected beauty of the colour, as well as the playful absurdity of using this material.

Can you talk more about this connection between joy and absurdity?

I associate absurdity very much with play, and play is joyful. Other connections include humour in the absurd, e.g. the odd rhymes and tongue twisters of several early Dr. Seuss books. I find that there is pleasure in being in a ‘non-logical place’ in your head, which is how I think of the absurd. It’s about the unexpected, fun, and delight that can be felt when exploring things that deliberately don’t make logical sense, but are full of wonder and joy. There is an importance in the purposelessness of the absurd, which is something that makes is joyful (to me) and thus also linked to play.

What is the role of joy in your work?

I think that joy, beauty, humour and play have been underrepresented in contemporary art over the last few decades. I’ve been interested in trying to address joy and happiness in my work for past ten years or so. I’m currently working on a sculpture installation project in homage to my mother, (who died just over two years ago). Even though it is a memorial work of sorts, I hope that it still somehow evokes a sense of joy.

I’m making a series of balls which are made exclusively out of fabric inherited from my mom. (She was a talented seamstress and made almost all my clothes during my childhood.)

What one object most symbolizes joy to you?

I think I’m torn between seeing the first tulips in early Spring and my favorite large white mixing bowl that I use when I bake a cake.

What’s inspiring you right now?

Colour, and the unexpected use of saturated colour: chartreuse yellow + green, fire engine red, brilliant orange.

What other designers, artists, or creators should Aesthetics of Joy readers know about?

There is an interesting website run by a researcher/academic in Rotterdam:  The World Database of Happiness. The layout of the site is dry aesthetically but I think that its wonderful that the subject of happiness is being studied in this way.

I like the work of Franz West very much. Another artist whose work I really like is Ana Rewakowicz.

You can see more of Naomi’s work here. (In particular, make sure to check out Polka Dot Wall, a site-specific installation I find very joyful.) Images courtesy of Naomi London.

When my brilliant friend Mimi O Chun posted this picture in her Instagram stream with the description “Rothko tribute,” she received a veritable ton of likes and comments, many urging her to turn the concept into a series, or even a full-fledged art bakery. Though Rothko himself was not a terribly joyful sort, these colorful, charming cookies are, and I couldn’t resist sharing the image with you all.

So, let’s hope this becomes the first of many in the Dead Artist Baked Goods series, as Mimi puts it. Though similar in feel to this first installment, I’d like to see some Albers cookies; I also think that Pollock would be pretty fun to make. Whose art would you like to see made into sweets?

Mimi O Chun on Instagram and Twitter

As you know I’m fascinated by language and color, and the dialogue between the two. And I’m captivated by tools, extenders of human capability that give myriad forms to the efforts of our hands. As a tool of communication, this is perhaps inefficient. But as a tool of expression, it is powerful. The typewriter is a piece by artist Tyree Callahan.

What I love most is how Callahan maintained the convention of case in the typewriter keys. You can see how shifting would affect the color, in most cases increasing the intensity, a nice if imperfect analogue for the upper case. Callahan has entered the piece for a West prize. You can learn how to vote for it here.

And along a similar vein (but with a completely different tone), there’s this cocktail typewriter, which translates from language to color to flavor. (A fun, but potentially dangerous tool in the wrong hands!)

{via Colossal}

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

Color doesn’t have to be poured out by the gallon to create a sense of joy. In fact, it’s often better in small doses, as in these works by Ethan Greenbaum. When people say “good fences make good neighbors,” maybe this is what they have in mind.

There’s also a human equivalent. I’ve featured in the past the kooky performance art of Companie Willi Dorner, a troupe of artists who wear brightly colored clothes and then squeeze themselves into tight urban spaces. I recently came across these images, which I hadn’t seen before, of a performance they did in New York last year.

Against a field of grey, color means more. It is a spark of something that has its own energy, something dynamic that has the potential to erupt, to bring more color. As Johannes Itten, father of contemporary color theory, put it: “Color is life: for a world without colors appears to us as dead.” Color, even in tiny doses, signals a desire for life.

Images: Ethan Greenbaum via the artist. Companie Willi Dorner via WSJ.

I’m spending quite a bit of time lately contemplating the emotional lives of cities. Between my talk at makeCalgary on designing joyful cities and a related installment in the works for my Core77 column, the topic of how our urban environments make us feel is top of mind at the moment. But it’s rare to see the city reflect our own emotion back at us. This project, Emotional Cities, is a novel exception, using light installations to project the collective emotional state of the city. City dwellers can input their mood on a web site via a simple color-coded schema. The original installation was in Stockholm (above) and a subsequent version was temporarily installed on the Palace Albania in Belgrade.

The project blog is unfortunately a bit dated, so it’s unclear whether it’s still going, but it’s a beautiful experiment nonetheless. I wonder what the effects are of knowing what everyone else in your city is feeling. If it’s a purple day (the lowest of the doldrums, on the Emotional Cities scale), do you feel dragged down? If it’s a red day (the happiest), do you feel a boost?

I can imagine we’ll see more of these types of projects in the near future, as the technology to create light installations is becoming more accessible and platforms like Twitter and Facebook are offering a robust and constantly updated data set on emotion and mood. It would be fun to see more buildings that become, as Emotional Cities says, like thermometers for the feelings of a city.

Ok, all you development people out there, here’s one to think about when you just can’t fathom picking up the phone to make one more “Help our cause” call. Own A Colour is a campaign to raise money for Unicef by naming colors in exchange for a donation. The donation for a color starts at 1£, but with 16.7 million colors available (the number that can be displayed by a contemporary computer screen) you can see how this could really add up.

Not only is the interface captivating, drawing on a tessellation motif that calls to mind the fragmented view through a kaleidoscope, but also I find the storytelling to be extremely well done. Using a mix of ordinary people and celebrities, the tiles are explained as they are named and claimed. Reading the stories, I’m reminded of this project, which also explores the interplay of color and memory, of the personal significance of a hue.

And while I know infographics are all the rage, and some of us may be getting a bit sick of them, I like this snapshot (below) as a way of navigating the color landscape. There’s something wonderful about seeing the different arrays of trending colors and random colors, and the color choices of different nationalities.

I’ve been talking a lot about generosity lately, about the idea that many things we find joyful are generous in some way, and I find this a great example because even though they’re asking for money, it still feels generous. I feel like I’m being given a world of color to explore and participate in. It makes me want to give. So let me get on that, and I hope you will too. Share a link to the colors you choose in the comments, or on Twitter!

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.

What do lollipops have to do with keeping the peace? Surprisingly, more than a little. A recent initiative by a city council in the city of Victoria in British Columbia offered free lollipops to drunken revelers leaving bars to cut down on noise and violence after a night out. Councillor Charlayne Thornton-Joe explained that the treats make it hard for inebriated partiers to be too loud, and that they minimize dialogue that could lead to brawls. More practically speaking, they also regulate blood sugar and, like pacifiers, have a calming effect.

While there’s no hard evidence that the lollipops worked, councillor Thornton-Joe says that it seemed to be so effective that the city is considering making it a permanent program. It’s a charming idea – that something so childlike and innocent could disarm a rowdy bunch. And it makes for a joyful image, to imagine adults appeased by candies on sticks.

This is aesthetics of joy at their beguiling best. Sugar, color, and a form that evokes nostalgia for childhood – these things have real power. Contrary to so much of what we are taught, they are not just styling or superficial extras. They are phrases in the language with which our stuff speaks to us, quietly shaping our desires and our behavior. It’s a joy to see them applied in a such a novel way, and for such playful problem-solving. I hope to see this idea take off in other places too.

Photo: Beautiful feather lollipops by Abbey Hendrickson of Aesthetic Outburst, via Pinterest
NPR: “Lollipops: Pacifiers for Bar Patrons?” 

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.

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}

These last few weeks I’ve been steeped in color. Literally, with the effusion of bright summer hues in the city, and figuratively, as I’ve been devoting many a spare moment to researching it. Color is the subject of chapter two and, as evidenced by the colorful nature of this blog, a nearly endless topic when considering design and joy.

Right now I’m reading a very thoughtful, scientific little book from the 1980s called Colour: Why the World Isn’t Grey, which covers everything from why rainbows appear to why flames are orange to why the sky is blue. As the author Hazel Rossotti demystifies these phenomena, she’s reminding me that some color seems particularly mysterious.

Intangible color – the color of the horizon, of an oil slick on a rain puddle, of a match-strike – has a trickiness to it. We perceive the color, but it is either too distant, too evanescent, or too changeable to feel certain in our impressions. The color feels deceptive, yet tantalizing. Though we know that pursuing it will leave us empty-handed, sometimes we go after it anyway. Like burying one’s nose in a magnolia flower only to find the thrum of fragrance all around, but pale within, we find our rainbows and sunsets accessible only from afar. I suppose we should feel grateful that their photons journeyed such a long way to our eyes in the first place.

Maybe there’s more joy to this kind of elusive chroma, or if not more, then certainly a distinct kind of joy – a delight mingled with longing. And that’s of course what joy should be from an evolutionary perspective. Not perfect satiation, but satiation plus motivation to continue seeking that “passage from lesser to greater perfection,” as Spinoza wrote. With its spiritual airiness, intangible color feels something like a promise, a reminder that still greater beauty is out in the world to be discovered.

With these thoughts on my mind, I wanted to share a few works that create a similar kind of intangible color, despite being constructed from tangible materials. The first, above, is a recent piece by Andy Gilmore, whose kaleidoscopic works I’ve long enjoyed and have posted in the past. This piece seems to vibrate in those light spaces where the hues fade out in steps. It’s almost as if it’s moving, and therefore impossible to fully take in all at once.

Below is a kind of 3D counterpoint to Gilmore, from artist Gabriel Dawe’s Plexus 4 and Plexus 5 series. These are similarly vibratory, almost spatial rather than material, like a dense chromatic fog. You almost feel as if you could walk right through them, though in fact they’re constructed from thousands of strands of thread. Like many natural examples of intangible color, these installations seem to radiate their own light, making them even more ethereal and compelling.

I hope you’re out enjoying a colorful weekend somewhere, intangible or otherwise…

Xx Ingrid

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

John Nese, proprietor of Galco’s Soda Pop Stop, exudes a childlike exuberance when he talks about his favorite subject: the independent and small batch bottles of pop he sells in his store. In this wonderful video interview by Chowhound, he reveals all kinds of interesting factoids about bubbly beverages, and projects an infectious enthusiasm for the topic.

Soda’s a hard one to claim as joyful, given its contribution to the obesity epidemic and myriad other health problems. But Nese reminds us that soda is a treat, something to be enjoyed occasionally, not guzzled in place of water as so many people do. When asked about diet sodas, he condemns most of them as unsavory, and says, “Drink less. How’s that? Have six ounces rather than twelve, and then you get 60 calories instead of 120 calories. And then you’re satisfied and you’re happy.”

Of course, moderation is hard when you’re facing the trifecta of color, sweetness, and bubbles. Especially the bubbles. Watching the solution fizz and sparkle, seeing the tiny orbs appear from nowhere, feeling them glitter on the palate – carbonation is an oddly magical pleasure. Upon discovering champagne, the monk Dom Perignon was said to exclaim, “Come quickly! I am tasting stars.” Though this story may well be apocryphal, the quote captures our sense of awe and delight at effervescence (alcoholic or otherwise). Something about bubbles seems to elevate us. They carry us upwards with their inexhaustible lightness, buoying our celebrations, our moments of refreshment and play.

We’re evidently not the only species that enjoys bubbles, either. While writing this post I remembered this sweet video of SeaWorld’s dolphins, which have turned bubbles into a novel underwater toy. Enjoy!

I can’t stop playing with this site. The online home of a traveling exhibit about everyday functional objects like the pencil and zipper, Hidden Heroes takes what could be a dull experience and makes it delightful – vibrant, sensorial, playful. Visit the site and see for yourself. The screenshots can’t communicate the pleasure of the transitions, the little joys of the sounds and swishes that bring elements in and out of view. Hidden Heroes, curated by the Vitra Design Museum (a joyful place in its own right), recently won a Webby for navigation, an element of interaction design that typically strives for clarity over enthusiasm.

But I love how the nav manages to incorporate color and whimsy without sacrificing clarity at all. In effect, the nav structures reflect the intention of the exhibit: to elevate the ordinary, to celebrate the stories of simple things. This is no mean feat. Abstracted from the tangibility of the artifacts, online exhibits often feel like poor cousins of the real thing, more effective as documentation than experience. But with all its abundance and brio, the Hidden Heroes exhibit feels like an experience first and foremost for the web, and I wonder if it’s perhaps more pleasurable even than the bricks-and-mortar version.

Web design is inherently constrained by the medium of the screen, and its power to evoke emotion is hindered by this constraint. It’s sensorially limited. It can’t stimulate the senses of touch, smell, or taste, three senses we know to be powerfully linked to our emotions. (Though a smell-o-vision inspired website is still a popular fantasy.) A neuroscientist I spoke with once went so far as to say that he didn’t think art on a screen could ever light up the emotional brain the way a painting could.

But what design for the screen lacks in texture and tangibility, it makes up for in dynamism, movement, and interactivity. At their best, designers who work in this field – interaction designers – floor me with the way they transform mundane experiences into joyful ones. I’m thinking of the Spectra visual newsreader, a uniquely colorful way to peruse the headlines, or the HEMA, a department store in the Netherlands that has created a Rube Goldberg-esque home page that must be experienced to be believed. (Seriously. I’m not even going to try to screenshot it.) More simply, I also love Supermarket Sarah, an online retailer that eschews the grid in favor of a clickable photo array for its navigation.

And finally, as I think of navigation and the web, I can’t help but think about this wonderful project by Alexander Chen, which is not at all about online navigation, but about using the online medium to give us a new perspective on offline navigation. Conductor: mta.me reenvisions the subway map as a string instrument. It is in effect a map come alive, drawing itself with charming lines, tones, and vibrations to overlay a lyrical quality onto something most city dwellers take for granted. Three separate people sent it to me with Aesthetics of Joy in mind, so I know this really spoke to people about delight! It certainly reminded me of the inherently joyful quality of transit maps, their colorful lines and intersections, and all the happenings you can imagine at their junctures. (The video is ok but again, go to the site to really experience it.)

Have I missed other joyful interfaces? Which websites bring you joy?

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).

Two years ago today I started this blog as a way of launching this little idea I had out into the world and seeing if it could be real. I feel as if I set one of those little toy boats into the circular pool in Central Park, only to find it’s become a real boat on a broad, blue ocean.

In the past two years, some of my greatest joys have come through this forum. From your thoughtful emails and comments to your inspiring tips and links, I find myself bowled over daily by the curiosity and generosity with which you engage with me in this adventure. I’m humbled and grateful that you share your time and insight with me on how you see the potential for more joy to be designed into the world. If only you knew how much you’ve challenged, encouraged, and motivated me over the past two years, as I’ve undertaken this daunting task of trying to understand and codify the aesthetics of joy.

In truth, this blog started as a way to catalog inspiration and think out loud while I worked on my book. It’s become so much more than that. The book is still not done, but when it is it will be immeasurably richer for the dialogue here. But more than that, I’ve seen the purpose of the blog in its own right, and it has given me ideas for other projects – exhibits, designs, essays – that I hope will also come to fruition.

Thank you for a wonderful two years, and here’s hoping for more joy in the years to come!

Xx Ingrid

Image: paper lanterns by and available at uguisu

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}

This book, by artist Kyo Myoung Kim, fascinates me. Spotted at an exhibit at the Cabinet space in Gowanus, Brooklyn a couple of months ago, the book has been lodged in my mind ever since. I can’t stop thinking about what it would be like to write this way, to communicate with a color language. Would you type it on a rainbow keyboard? Or compose on a color wheel? What kind of pen would you have to design to produce these signs?

Imagine the experience of creating this book, translating it from words into reds, violets, and oranges. What would it be like to be drilled as a child on a chromatic alphabet? To unlock meaning effortlessly from this linguistic confetti?

Hue, saturation, value: What roles would these play? I can’t help but push this further. Pure hues might be phonemes, and the lengths of the bars might indicate inflection. Value might be volume. Saturation might be emotional tenor. Can you imagine the beauty and the power of a language like this? I was reading this week about how phonetic languages (most Western languages), as opposed to pictographical languages (Chinese, Japanese, etc.), offer the flexibility to be able to write in dialect. I never thought about this before, but because all we’re doing in writing English is transliterating sounds, we can change these sounds around to suggest a drawl or foreign intonation. A language like this color language I’m suggesting, though it would be nearly impossible to master, would allow new layers of meaning and direction to rise from the page. Think how crude our written tools of emotional expression – the all caps, the exclamation point – seem, against the possibility that words themselves could be colored based on emotion and volume. In a novel, you could see an argument set in dark, deeply saturated bars. A mumbler would speak in strands of near-grays. A languid, happy character would shine through long bars of bright pastels. A new richness of plot and character would be available to writers and readers.

A reader would not actually need to understand the language to feel some of the meaning. Like spoken language, where we understand much from inflection, even in languages we’ve never heard before. One could flip through a book in this color language and feel the arc of the story, understanding the emotional narrative if not the descriptive one.

This language also would mean the same speech might look different when uttered by a different speaker. I’m imagining a poem written in this language, transcribed as read by three different readers. How different these would look, but still comparable, because all the hues would be the same. Or imagine a small book, with a series of poems as read by two readers, the two variations facing each other across the pages. (A project for a rainy day.)

I suspect there might be two unexpected discoveries in this exercise. One, that the immediacy of color might change the meanings of words. Some words might be unexpectedly beautiful, others jarring, depending on the new system. A kind of synaesthetic onomatopoeia might emerge. And secondly, that folding emotion into language might create a different kind of awareness of emotional content in dialogue. If we had to encode what we’re feeling in language, how would this articulation affect us? And if our emotion were indicated in our writing, how might our relationships change? Would we feel closer to each other, or would new misunderstandings arise? Would color language be a truer reflection of our minds? Or just a richer one, without any bias towards precision or accuracy?

Correction: The name of the artist of this piece should have read Hyo Myoung Kim. Apologies for the error. You can find more of Hyo Myoung’s work here.