aesthetics of joy

I came home last Sunday evening to sounds of laughter and the smell of woodsmoke coming up from the backyard. It was one of those frigid nights we’ve been having, the kind of night when a balaclava seems to make sense for something other than a bank robbery. I pressed my nose up to the window to look outside, and it sent a chill right to the root of my spine. But then I saw it: first the flicker of the campfire, illuminating a handful of bundled revelers holding sticks with marshmallows. And then, squinting into the dim light, something even better: a slick of ice, and boys on skates.

This is a Brooklyn backyard we’re talking about here, about as small a patch of real estate as you could imagine. And yet, faced with an endless stretch of freezing temperatures, my neighbors decided to make their own fun. They flooded a patch of the concrete yard with a hose, let it freeze, and had their own ice-skating rink (barely larger than a dining table, mind you), their own winter wonderland.

You might ask what this has to do with design. It has everything to do with design. This is people altering their environment, using the tools at hand, to create joy for themselves and others. We often say: design loves constraints. And this is a brilliant design under the constraints of winter in a dense northeastern city, a way to be outside and together when the mood gravitates towards being inside in solitude. It’s a beautifully aesthetic moment too—light, movement, warmth, the sweetness of marshmallows, and the small swooping curves of skaters on their tiny rink—an oasis in what can often be a bleak time.

Make your own fun, this winter or whenever. Make your own joy.

Here’s something subtle, yet charming, in honor of today’s snowy day. Artist Toshihiko Shibuya adds color to snow through reflection. By painting metal disks and plates with bright colors, he creates a vibrant palette in the snow. I love the magic of this, letting the elements (in this case, snow) reveal a hidden hue. It’s very Japanese, to work with the landscape, to patiently tease out color from the interactions between forces rather than painting it thick across the top.

I was enchanted by the same color reflections when doing space analysis in design school. I used to spend untold hours hanging colored planes in boxes made of foam core so that the light would tinge just so. Based on this fascination, I designed one of the pieces for my thesis using the same idea. I don’t often share my work on this site, but this seems relevant. I designed the stools below to almost disappear when looked at head on. Then when stacked, they reveal their hidden color.

The intent of my thesis was to illustrate different essential ideas of Aesthetics of Joy in simple furniture forms. I designed 10 pieces. If you like these, maybe I’ll post more… I miss furniture design. I love creating utilitarian things that brighten up everyday life. One day, when I finish this book, I’ll get back to it. (And hopefully that will be sooner, rather than later!)

Images: Toshihiko Shibuya’s work courtesy of Designboom; mine are my own

At the risk of becoming the all-rainbows-all-the-time blog, I had brave monotony to share one more. Though these rare formations have the familiar red-to-violet spectrum, they are technically not rainbows, but “circumzenithal arcs.” They owe their upside-down shape to light refracted by ice crystals high up in the atmosphere. Note also that the colors appear in reverse order, with violet on top and red at the bottom.

Circumzenithal arcs are about as common as rainbows, but they seem rarer; because they appear at such high altitudes, they are harder to spot. A good place to look for them is in cirrus clouds.

One more reason to look up more often: you might see the sky smiling back at you.

Via: The Weather Network, with thanks to Michael McQuay for the tip.
Images: Jack Justice and Michel Talbot.

This may have already crossed your transom, but even so I wanted to share it because it is so beautiful. The project, called 21 Balançoires (21 Swings), is an installation in Montreal by the Canadian design collective Daily Tous Les Jours. The swings play sounds when in use, and through cooperation, different harmonies can be produced. One special set of melodies only appears when all twenty-one swings are in use.

There are layers of joy in this piece. It starts with a familiar form, the playground swing. We may think this is joyful simply because of nostalgia for childhood. There is that, but it’s not the whole story. Dig deeper, and ask: How did the swing get so popular in the first place? The answer arises from the movement; the soaring, freeing, swooping arc that gives the sensation of flying and that millisecond of weightlessness before the gentle fall. Layered on top is the music, and the light, and the abundance of it all — the line of swings stretching on and on, an endless playground.

The collaborative aspect adds another dimension. The music echoes that wonderful feeling when you find yourself perfectly in sync with others, when the hidden harmonies of the world are revealed. One of the teenagers in the film puts this nicely when he says: ”I find it adds to the beauty of life, because a single sound isn’t really nice, but together they make a beautiful melody.” And actually, we frequently use these kinds of musical metaphors to describe our feeling of symbiosis with others: we resonate to someone, or sing the same tune, or feel in harmony with each other.

It’s a success for public art in my book, not just to be pleasing or interesting, but to celebrate the interactions between people, promoting cooperation and harmony. Are there installations like this in your cities? If so, please share them!

via Colossal, with thanks to Sera

Summer is that season of joyful, frenetic energy when our lives seem at their most vibrant. Soaked in the light of long days, we go from scene to scene without the same need for rest we have in other seasons. We are fueled by solar energy, our molecules sped up, expanding in the heat. Work slows down, weekends expand. And every once-empty space brims with abundance: with foods, with sensations, with delight. The pleasures are simple, but all encompassing.

It all goes too fast. But at the end I look back and wonder how it was possible that I did so many things. I seem to have been everywhere at once, on a beach and a farm, a rooftop and a stadium, an island and an opera house. By all measures, it has been a gorgeously full summer.

But it’s not over yet! There’s one more weekend, and I hope you’re making the most of it. My wish for you is that you get to do one wonderful summer thing that you didn’t get to do, perhaps that you put off doing, for the last three months. Maybe you haven’t eaten a fat red tomato, or browsed a yard sale, or put your feet in salty ocean water. Whatever it is, I hope you enjoy every minute!

Joyfully,
Ingrid

In May, I went to Tokyo for work. (If you follow me on Instagram, you may have seen a number of photos with the tag #joyinjapan.) For some, this might mean sitting in a conference center most of the time, getting to eat some sushi between lectures and walk around Shibuya a bit. But lucky me (and I mean that — lucky, lucky me), my job involves being completely out there, talking to people, experiencing the city’s smells, sounds, and colors, drinking a place in until I’m drunk.

Where do I begin with it all? I felt so joyful in Japan I could hardly stand it. Like when someone is tickling you and you’re laughing and you get to a point where feel like you’re going to explode and you beg them to stop — “Please, please, no more!” — and as the feeling subsides and you’re able to breathe again a quiet little voice pipes up inside you, whispering…

“More. Please, just a little more.”

There isn’t one thing to point to, but a thousand small gestures that accumulate to leave you almost woozy with delight. Tokyo is a relentless layering of vibrant color palettes, cute icons, sweet miniatures, subtle textures, and delicate objects arranged just so. (And also some things that are so crazy they make your head spin around in full revolutions.) It’s a testament to a people that has a true material culture, a people that feels kinship with the objects in their lives and understands that beautiful things are valuable not as status symbols but because they suffuse beauty into the spaces around them.

Alain de Botton writes: “What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.” This is the crux of what I felt in Tokyo. I sensed the beauty that emanated from the perfectly balanced, crafted way of things, and wanted to strive for more of this in myself. A beautifully crafted plate of food or a carefully lettered sign showed care, and it made me want to slow down and appreciate the care my hosts put into these small gestures. My travel companions and I all changed our behavior over the course of the week. We were more polite, we noticed more, we ate more slowly. We let the place change us in a good way.

Every day we walked the city until our feet hurt. At night, I would wake up at about 4am from the jet lag, my feet still pulsing, hoping a few more hours of sleep would ease them. We took thousands of photos. There was a surprise around nearly every corner — we were afraid to put our cameras away. My travel companions, fellow IDEOers Anthony and Erika, and I (all above) were lucky to have some amazing hosts. In some of my photos you’ll see Mike, a good friend of mine since my first day at IDEO, who is now in our Tokyo office. He wins the “host of the year” award, making sure we saw his favorite places (such as the tiny coffee shop pictured top right and lower left, below), ordered for us in places with no English menus, and even pointed us towards very specific observations, like that that gorgeous reflection of the copper sink in Higashiyama’s bathrooms (below).

I was also excited to spend some time with Azusa, a friend of mine from Pratt (you may remember her joyful work from this post a few years back). Azusa took us one night to get yuzu ramen (noodles flavored with yuzu, a Japanese citrus fruit) and after, we discovered a tiny little bar with only about ten seats. There, a bartender proceeded to make the most thoughtful screwdriver I’ve ever seen. The screwdriver must be the most thoughtless of cocktails, sloshed together in questionable proportions, often in a Solo cup. But this bartender showed me the screwdriver-as-art-form: squeezing the juice by hand, shaking the drink as if he were in slow motion. I don’t think I will ever see a cocktail performed in that way again, totally simple, yet with honor for its simplicity.

We stayed our last few nights at the Claska, technically the only boutique hotel in Tokyo. The Claska is a wonderful, odd place for many reasons. It is a bit out of the way, but it has a gorgeous sixties modern lobby and the most beautiful gift shop, full of perfect, quirky artifacts. But by far my favorite feature of the Claska is the retro dog grooming salon just off the lobby (pictured above). A long window, positioned at eye level just by the lobby bar, peeks into the space, where you can watch dogs get fluffed to the max by a passel of groomers using humorously space-age dryers. I never saw a dog walk out of there that didn’t look like it couldn’t blow away on a light wind.

A highlight was a visit to Midori Sushi in Shibuya, where you order from an iPad and the sushi is delivered to your table by toy trains. Toy! Trains! You might think that with such an emphasis on precision and self-control, the Japanese would not show much evidence of their “inner child.” But in fact, the inner child is alive and well in Japan, breaking through in an unabashed embrace of cuteness and play, even in serious situations. The toy train idea is something that seems to have been thought up by an eight year-old. Here in the states it would be discarded as ridiculous, but fortunately the Japanese don’t censor themselves in this way.

On our very last day in Tokyo, Erika and I were wandering around the area near Gakugei-Daigaku station and spotted these beautiful books. Stripped of their jackets, they were selling for pennies apiece, and we spent the better part of an hour looking for ones with interesting illustrations to bring back with us. Inside one were these very simple, beautiful erotic line drawings. (Japan has a long tradition of exuberant erotic art, mostly woodblock prints known as shunga.) Azusa was embarrassed but obliging in translating the chapter headers for us. (Nothing too exciting, or I promise I would’ve written them down to share.)

Hidari Pocket in Naka Meguro is the tiniest, cutest café I have ever seen. The garlands, the little drawings on the side of the van, the tiny weathered stools, the drawings of flowers in the foam on the mocha — it was just too much. In moments like this, we often found ourselves overcome, aesthetically, with the experiences we were having. It was almost as if the circuits in our brains couldn’t handle all the beauty, harmony, cuteness, and cleverness. By a few days in, we actually coined a name for this: design convulsions. Suffice it to say, when three out of four designers at a table have their cameras pointed at a very ordinary object, you can be pretty sure it’s a collective design convulsion.

There is a palimpsestic quality to Tokyo that you start to discover, as you adjust to it and it starts to unfold for you. There are layers that smack you in the face with their daring or their sweetness. But underpinning these are tiers of sensation: patterns, textures, and reflections that are seductive in their simplicity. I came back so filled with inspiration, I was nearly vibrating. I’ll share more in the coming days, about some specific things that just took my breath away. In the meantime, have you been to Tokyo? What joys did you see there?

Images: a mix of mine and Erika Lee’s; most of the better ones are Erika’s!

Last year on the 4th of July, I gathered with a horde of others on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade to try to catch a glimpse of the Hudson River fireworks display. It was a crowd united by optimism. We had the whole city of Manhattan between us and the lights, as imposing fence as could exist, but still we were all there, hopeful and wanting. So when the first booms sounded, and a few reflected glimmers sneaked through the slices of sky between buildings, there were cheers and hollers. Like a bunch of vagabonds peering into a theater from the rafters, we saw only halos and flecks, but it didn’t matter because we part of it. Celebration is so abundant, even its detritus is joyful. You can bask in its leftovers for weeks.

These amazing vintage fireworks labels (courtesy of British pyrotechnics enthusiast and historian Steven Johnson and his Firework Heritage Museum) give off no light or noise, but they have a similar kind of joyful residue. The various stars and sunbursts, flickers and flames, twinkles and sparks: they’re so evocative, you can almost hear the pops, hisses, and crackles, building a kind of aesthetic anticipation. You can’t wait to strike a match and see what happens.

And the names! One year my mother, Nana, and I all watched the fireworks together, coming up with names for all the different effects. But Spangled Star Bomb? Brock’s Twinkler? Radium Dazzler? Those old firework-makers had a poetic flair and a joyful spirit that has us completely beat. (Though I think “Wonder Banger” might have shifted meaning a bit since then.)

I’m off to try to see the fireworks again, this time from the slightly better vantage point of some friends’ rooftop. If I see any, you’ll find them on Instagram. I hope you’re seeing fireworks somewhere tonight too. But if not, be like the clever Sean Ohlenkamp and make some of your own. Have a Flambo Jambo 4th of July!

Friends, I’ve missed you! I hope you’ve had a lovely spring. Mine passed in the blink of an eye through the rounded shape of an airplane window (and the haze of Allegra). I’ve been on the road this spring (and allergic to it)! Back now, and trying to unpack the virtual suitcase of inspiration gathered in Tokyo, San Francisco, Miami, and upstate New York. There’s a lot in there, and I’m processing. (In Tokyo alone I took over 2000 photos!) Sit tight – there’s good stuff coming.

In the meantime, let’s have some color. All the talk of the fashion pages this spring has been that color is having a moment. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that we are having a moment with color—basking in pure, saturated hues. Have you been into J. Crew lately? You need sunglasses! It’s no cure for our perpetually dismal economic situation or the many geopolitical troubles we find ourselves in, but it does make the city feel brighter, more optimistic. As a prototypical black-clad New Yorker, I can say it’s been a nice change. Walking out in a kelly green sweater with a hot pink scarf feels so abundant and absurd it just gives you something to smile about.

The thing we forget about color is how alive it is, and how dynamic our relationship is to it. Just seeing a color is an energetic act. I’m reminded of Victoria Finlay’s description in her book Color: A Natural History of the Palette:

The best way I’ve found of understanding this is to think not so much of something “being” a color but of it “doing” a color. The atoms in a ripe tomato are busy shivering—or dancing or singing—the metaphors can be as joyful as the colors they describe—in such a way that when the light falls on them they absorb most of the blue and yellow light and reject the red—meaning paradoxically that the “red” tomato is actually one that contains every wavelength except red.

Color is not an entity, but a performance. We see color because of the light from the sun (or other source) that bounces off an object’s surface towards the light-sensitive cone cells in our eyes. As the light’s photons reach a colored surface, they excite the electrons on that surface, which absorb some of the wavelengths, while the others ricochet outward. And when a few photons of those reflected wavelengths reach our eyes, the cone cells in our retinas with the relevant pigments are stimulated. The energy absorbed by the pigment sends a signal up the optic nerve, and our brains register the sensation of color. We’re not detached witnesses to color; rather, we are part of the experience of it. Some molecules of our being are aroused by color, some cells are stirred into an electrical excitation—literally “turned on.”  Putting it simply, when we have seen color, we have absorbed some small transfer of energy from it. Is it any wonder that we feel energized by its vibrance?

The brighter the color, the more light being reflected, and the more energy that is transferred. So our moment of bright color is a moment of exuberant communication between our garments and our eyes. I think it’s plausible for there to be unintended effects. Who knows? Perhaps you need less caffeine when your deskmate is wearing fluorescent yellow. Or that a bright blue desktop background is as good as a breath of fresh air. Color is more powerful than we realize.

Radiolab has a brilliant episode this month pondering color. Highly recommended. My favorite segment ponders the rainbow from the perspective of animals with a far broader range of color vision than us puny humans. (Go mantis shrimp!) Jad and Krul engage a choir to “sing the rainbow” — very synesthetic, and if I know you, it’ll be up your alley.

Some other color links that have been burning a hole in my inbox:

• The Color Run: 5k race meets Holi festival. Emerge looking like you’ve been through a spin-art machine. At the rate these races have been selling out, you know the organizers are onto something here.
• Color Forecast: Why read a weather forecast when you can read a color forecast? Measures the color of clothing of passersby and gives you a window into “trending” colors. Available for Paris, Milan, and Antwerp.
• Nippon Colors: A gorgeously designed site showcasing traditional colors from Japan.

Thanks, RW, for the Radiolab tip!
Images: J Crew, the Color Run

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.

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}