aesthetics of joy

Are any of you feeling like this year took off at a gallop and hasn’t quite given you time to find your seat in the saddle? You can blame my recent quietude on that and Downton Abbey. (I quit cable only to be seduced by Dame Maggie Smith and WWI drama on pbs.org. But I digress.)

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about birdsong. It started with this TEDtalk, in which Julian Treasure talks about the psychological benefits of birdsong. You know birdsong feels uplifting intuitively, but do you know why? The explanation is so sensible you’ll smack your forehead when I tell you. It’s because birds chirp when things are safe, and go quiet when there’s danger. So for thousands of years birdsong has been a subtle background signal that tells us, unconsciously, that we’re safe. Just because we don’t typically rely on that cue any more doesn’t mean our brains aren’t still wired for it. Though it’s an anachronism for many city dwellers, it’s still relaxing. And if the birds’ tones are particularly pleasant, they might even spur a sense of joy.

This is just one example of biophilia, a theory developed by E.O. Wilson postulating that humans have a natural, evolved affinity for the natural world. According to the theory, all kinds of natural stimuli can have a positive effect on wellbeing. (More here.) There’s a spike in research on this topic, and birdsong is among the aesthetic elements being researched. In the UK, the Guardian reported on a new study that will study effects of birdsong on people over the next three years. Eleanor Ratcliffe, the researcher conducting the study believes birdsong could also have effects on productivity and creativity.

Another question up for exploration: Does birdsong have the same effect when recorded? Sample of one reporting here, but I think it could. Earlier this week I downloaded the free Birdsong app for iPhone and have been listening in the mornings while getting ready for work, and it definitely perked me up. (Soundtrack to this post provided by the birds in my Brooklyn backyard recorded last spring. Bonus for birdwatching readers who want to tell me what species are hanging out back there.)

Delving deeper, research has shown that birdsong contains fractal patterns, suggesting some underlying symmetry in the sounds themselves that is pleasing to us. Fractals are intricate patterns that repeat themselves infinitely at different scales. Fractals can be found in coastlines, clouds, snowflakes, and blood vessels, as well as many works of art. (Jackson Pollock’s paintings have been analyzed and discovered to have fractal dimensions.) The authors of a paper on fractals and beauty, Alex Forsythe and Noel Sheehy, write:

It is thought that fractals tap into specialist cognitive modules that have developed to modulate information about living things, and that such modules are linked with emotional regulation… Hagerhall et al. reported that viewing fractal patterns elicited high alpha activity in the areas of the brain concerned with attention and visual spatial processing (the frontal lobes and parietal area).

Allow me to translate: Research suggests that our brains respond unconsciously to fractals, regarding them as information that gives us critical insight about our surroundings, and tell us how to feel them. We don’t need conscious knowledge that fractals are involved. Regardless of our awareness, we sense an intuitive order that gives us comfort. In fact, the authors note that studies have shown fractal patterns can reduce physiological stress. Another primal, comforting sound – the human heartbeat – also has a fractal dimension, and the more fractal it is, the healthier it is likely to be. So, perhaps birdsong actually has a kind of symmetrical microstructure that speaks to us through these hidden neural pathways. And perhaps tapping into its tones and rhythms could help create soundscapes that can counteract some of the stress of hectic, noisy modern lives.

As our favorite Portlandia crafters know, looking at images of birds doesn’t hurt either, and I love this series by photographer Paul Nelson, featured in an exhibit called Sky and Sea put on by Lux Archive at The Natural Wine Company in Brooklyn. It’s wonderful to see the birds set apart from the world, aloft. (Even better to know none were harmed in the shooting – Nelson uses a specialized rig to capture the ethereal images.) The exhibit runs until May 9.

*Correction: The original version of this post misidentified the site of the exhibit. The exhibit is at The Natural Wine Company, not the Lux Gallery (if such a place even exists!)

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).

I’m  still trying to put my finger on what exactly is so joyful about Bzzzpeek, a site where you can play recordings of what children think animals sound like in different parts of the globe. Is it the sweet, earnest quality of the children’s imitations? The general cuteness of the site design? Or just the charm of being able to travel the world via quacks and ribbits? I don’t know, but the moment it appeared in my inbox (thank you, Jon), it brought a smile to my face.

The deeper question here is why we feel the need to imitate animal sounds when we have words to describe the animals. Before we had language, “Moo,” was a good way to alert neighbors to a food source. Now, when we can say, “There’s a herd of cows grazing just over the grassy knoll,” “Moo” seems terribly obsolete. Of course, there are still a few functional reasons to make animal sounds: birders do it to attract different species to look at, pet owners do it out of some empathic desire to connect with their pets. But why do children do it? I wonder if there’s some innate pleasure in imitation, or if there’s some other reason why we simply enjoy making animal sounds. Thoughts?

New York magazine’s Lady Gaga cover story this week again had me thinking about joy. She’s so playful with fashion and identity that I can’t help but feel a sense of delight at her style choices. In December I considered some of Gaga’s outfits and concluded that the bubble dress was the most joyful. So it gave me a little burst of joy to read that Lady Gaga seems to feel the same way:

Gaga was very taken with her new “bubble dress” at this point, and we talked about its unreality, the beauty of the imaginary. Everyone wanted that dress, but it wasn’t a dress at all—it was a bunch of plastic balls. “On my tour,” she declared, “I’m going to be in my bubble dress on a piano made of bubbles, singing about love and art and the future. I should like to make one person believe in that moment, and it would be worth every salt of a No. 1 record.” She dropped the accent for a moment now—the real girl, unartificed, was right underneath—and leaned in. “I can have hit records all day, but who fucking cares?” she explained. “A year from now, I could go away, and people might say, ‘Gosh, what ever happened to that girl who never wore pants?’ But how wonderfully memorable 30 years from now, when they say, ‘Do you remember Gaga and her bubbles?’ Because, for a minute, everybody in that room will forget every sad, painful thing in their lives, and they’ll just live in my bubble world.”

That’s joy, right? Something evanescent but memorable, something that stays with us in a way that is compelling, repeatable, and a little bit timeless. A little bit of the imaginary where it doesn’t quite belong.

From time to time this blog needs to consider serious subjects. Fortunately, today is not one of those days. This week the NYT style section gives us a thoughtful discussion of Lady Gaga’s significance to fashion culture, accompanied by a retrospective of sorts in slideshow-form. With so many examples and such a diverse array of looks to choose from, it’s hard not to have favorites. (See more looks here.) But which are the most joyful?

The overly burlesque looks are out of contention, as too much sex crosses the line from joy into some other sort of emotion. The fact that we’re going for inner child here, and not inner sex kitten, rules out a lot of looks. Most of her looks are evoking cool, or anti-cool, or just plain weird. While the ethos is playful, the aesthetics are by and large very adult.

But I found a few examples joyful aesthetics in the mix. The bubble-dress, below, has my vote for the most absurdly, childishly delightful look of the bunch. It’s almost as if she got swept away by a cluster of dishwashing suds and dropped onto the stage with no time to change. I love the way the colored lights reflect in the surfaces of the spheres, iridescent. The radiating hair-halo, above, also has a joyful quality to it — a costumey echo of a Medieval nimbus, or a warm, golden sun. I also like the reflective, light-scattering quality of the mirror ball look (bottom). The curves of the skirt have a joyful arc, but the sharp triangular panel earns demerits. Sharp things trigger a primal fear reaction deep in a part of the emotional brain called the amygdala. The heightened alertness and emotional intensity of sharp things is odds with joy, though it’s probably just right for the kind of reaction Gaga is typically going for.

Any other Lady Gaga styles that give you a sense of delight? Any joyful looks I overlooked?

NYT: When Lady Gaga Appears, So Do Her Many Influences

Yesterday “Stripes!” and today “Fela!”  This might be the week of exclamation point titles. They’re the most joyful punctuation, and with all the work and so little sleep, I’m getting a little punchy. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll write about those bushmen whose name has the ! at the beginning, the !Kung, and then finish the week out with some Lichtenstein paintings!

Please, don’t mind me. Sleep deprivation makes me giddy. (!)

But back to the order of the day, which is a short note about Fela! the musical, a biopic about the legendary founder of the Afrobeat genre of music Fela Kuti, which has just moved to the Eugene O’Neill from Off-Broadway. My friend Maggie scored free tickets to the Saturday night preview show and I just could not stay at home with the laptop with that on offer. It would not have been the joyful thing to do.

I arrived flustered and let’s just be honest, more than a little cranky. I left light as a feather. What happened in between? Music, of course — Fela’s soul-stirring, body-shaking sounds, brought to life by Antibalas, a Brooklyn Afrobeat band, charismatic lead Sahr Ngaujah and the sensational Lillias White. Dancing — not just by men who seem born in motion and women whose bodies seem to be all hips and no spine, but by you too, every last gangly uncoordinated one of you. And the color and energy of costumes that are positively kinetic in their vibrancy.

I couldn’t help but dig up a little history. This video shows Fela in concert — his songs were known to run 20 minutes or longer — so you can get a feel for the music and the joyous performance style if you aren’t familiar with it.

On the revolutionary music blog Revolucion, No you can find lots more about Kuti’s music, as well as these great images of his “queens,” the women who were his dancers and also his wives. These really give you a sense of the gorgeous energy that inspired Marina Draghici’s wonderful costumes and sets.

The translation from history to real life is so vivid, so immersive, that you can’t help but feel that you’re in a completely different world for a few hours. You’re certainly a long way from Broadway!

Read the NYT review: Making Music Mightier Than the Sword
See images of the sets and costumes from the show
Get tickets here

Whoa whoa whoa!

That was my friend Peter’s reaction to evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson’s NYT blog post this week, which discussed the connection between making certain sounds (such as “eeee”) and positive emotion, via what’s called the facial feedback hypothesis. Judson explains the link and then goes on to wonder: Do certain languages with “smiling sounds” make their speakers feel happier than others? Are some languages, by a curious accident of circumstances, languages of happiness?

Peter’s reaction was mine as well, because we had just had this exact conversation a few weeks ago. I was expressing my frustration in being unable to find a linguist who could illuminate the connection between language and the facial feedback hypothesis. I had done this post on words that make you joyful early on in the blog’s history, and drawing on Eric Weiner’s “Mol-do-va” (dour) vs. “Ja-mai-ca” (euphoric) comparison I was sure there had to be research on the subject. Peter then told me he had formulated this hypothesis 35 years ago, and had long believed in the power of onomatopoeic words like “glee” to boost your mood.

According to Judson, no research has really been done to confirm or refute these suppositions. But, going on what we do know we can deduce a premise that intuitively feels plausible. If induced smiles have been shown to impact mood (as they have in several studies, most notably this one), and certain sounds induce smiles, then it seems likely that these sounds could influence mood, and by extension, so could the languages that make frequent use of them.

If, through research, we discover this is true, then it adds in an exciting way to the pool of sounds that can be considered intrinsic aesthetics of joy. We already accept the emotional content of musical sounds — that a bright, brassy note from a trumpet is joyous while a drawn-out note on a cello is baleful and contemplative. And certain voices affect us similarly — the high pitch of a child’s voice triggering a different emotional response than the husky bass of an old man. With linguistic sounds, the question is slightly different because it is not about the sound itself, but the motions required to produce the sound — the accident of nature that conflated smiling and speaking functions into the same muscles.

This leads to another interesting question: do you have to actually make the “eeee” sound, or is just hearing it or seeing it pronounced enough? For true facial feedback, you’d actually need to perform the gesture. But I wonder if seeing the action might trigger another brain mechanism — mirror neurons — that might augment the effect of a “happiness language” through social interaction. Mirror neurons are a relatively recent (and extremely exciting) discovery in neuroscience. They fire not just when we perform an action, but also when we see or hear the action being performed by another. Supposedly, these neurons help us learn something new through imitation, whether its a language, an instrument, or another skill. If this is true, then perhaps just sitting across the table from a person making “eeee” sounds over brunch could give your mood a boost, and a “happiness language” could have a contagious quality, infecting people with positivity even during mundane interactions.

What does this have to do with design? Perhaps we could design a language for happiness. I’m not talking about the next Esperanto, but what about a new slang that replaces a few of the most frequently used words with eeee-heavy alternatives? We could adopt the Spanish “sí” for yes, but draw out the vowel so it becomes “seee” and choose another eeee word for no. Start pronouncing “the” as “thee,” as in “theeee end.” Push, pull, stop, go, walk, don’t walk — the verbs of urban living might all have smiling correlates.

What else could design do with smiling sounds? Redesign positive affirmations to use smile-inducing words, so that the act of speaking them reinforces the message. Change the yoga chant from “om” to “eeem.” Use smiling sounds in the naming of new products so that saying the name intrinsically creates a positive connection. Create linguistic-based facial exercises for sufferers of depression. Incorporate verbal keywords into the computing experience, all based around smiling sounds, so that instead of feeling frustration at our computers, we feel…a little less frustration. Design verbally activated switches for the home that react to “eeee” sounds — a happier “Clapper.” These are just top-of-mind thoughts, but the possibilities are intriguing. They may sound silly, but that could just be the point. At least, if you pronounce it “silleeee.”

NYT: A Language of Smiles
Image: Ferdinand Reus, CC

I dare you not to giggle while watching this short film from the People in Order series by Lenka Clayton and John Price. The film presents people in age order from 1 to 100 years old.

The drum device is pure aesthetics of joy — an exuberant bang that runs like a unifying thread through the ages. It also distinguishes them: the four and five year-olds’ delicious pleasure in generating noise is a powerful contrast with the defiant staccato of the their 96 and 100 year-old elders — pithy reverberations that seem to say, “We’re still here!” Each age has its mind, distilled into gesture and sound.

{via Mental Floss}

Design is at its most effective when it encourages or transforms human behavior for the better. There’s a lot of talk about how we need adopt healthier or more eco-friendly habits. The onus is on us to make the changes, but design can facilitate the behavior and make it easier or more enjoyable to change. Examples abound: the George Foreman grill, dedicated recycling bins, 100-calorie snack packaging. All of these things make it easier to do the right thing. Easier, yes, but not necessarily any more pleasurable, which is where The Fun Theory comes in.

An initiative of Volkswagen, the Fun Theory is a series of experiments that demonstrate how joyful design can encourage positive changes in behavior. In the video above, a staircase goes from being the less-chosen alternative to the escalator to the preferred path after the addition of some giant piano keys. In another video, litter collection rises after an amusing noise is introduced to a public trash can.

The pre/post measurements are striking and really prove the point that aesthetics of joy — through interaction, play, sound, and surprise — can create real, immediate change in the way we live.

{via PSFK}

When I moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn, I discovered something I had missed without realizing it: the sounds of the birds. Now that I live on the top floor of a brownstone with a lush, critter-friendly backyard, I find myself at ear-level with the most amazing array of birds. This morning they were really going nuts, reveling in the warm cloudy day. I captured a few of their calls to share with you.

I’m off the Met to see the Vermeers and the new American wing — I hope you’re having a joyful weekend!

Listen to the birds

Image by the always wonderful John&Fish

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

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

Peter Feld has the original Woodstock poster designed by Arnold Skolnick on his blog today, and it struck me as wonderful example of aesthetics of joy: celebration, music, and inclusiveness all so cleanly expressed with the bright colors, friendly type, and big, rounded, hand-made imagery. Truly iconic, joyful design that captured the spirit of a transformative cultural moment.

Skolnick is releasing a limited edition 40th anniversary version, though unfortunately I can’t find images of it, so I can’t tell if he’s altered it significantly. The article does give a bit of interesting history on the design of the poster, though, in case you’re interested in knowing more.

Perhaps it’s a bit of an adolescent male’s vision of joy, but the bevy of bikini-clad models taking part in electronic musician Calvin Harris’s Humanthesizer (human + synthesizer) look like they’re having a pretty great time.

I love the use of technologies like conductive paint and Arduino to integrate a new level of play and freedom into the process of making music. You see a lot of these types of music and technology explorations at the twice-yearly ITP shows, but this is a level of human integration I haven’t seen before, and it strikes me as the beginning of a wonderful new genre of musical performance, involving beautiful collaborations between dancers, designers, artists, composers, and musicians.

I’m guilty of not being much of a public television watcher (even as I adore public radio), so I’m awfully glad that the New York Times reviewed tonight’s Nova: Musical Minds in this morning’s paper. I haven’t yet read Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, the latest of Dr. Sacks’s explorations into atypical neuroscience, but this was a pretty good primer. The show tells the stories of several people with unusual relationships to music: a guy with Tourette’s who discovered drumming keeps his tics in check, a blind and autistic man with a gift for piano, a man who developed a magical musical ability after being struck by lightning, and a woman who gets no pleasure from music at all.

The show also treats us to fMRIs of the brain of Dr. Sacks himself, on music, so to speak. Interested as I am in the way that music relates to joy, it was particularly exciting to see how many parts of the brain are involved in the enjoyment of music. Sacks points out that even some of the oldest parts of the brain, such as the cerebellum, get in on the act when music is processed in the brain, suggesting to me that music is a very deep, very old pleasure for humans.

You can watch the entire episode online tomorrow, here. I highly recommend it!

A few weeks ago I wrote about the joy of seeing the world from above. Today, I discovered more evidence that I’m certainly not alone in that penchant: the “From the Airplane Window” pool on Flickr, 1421 members strong.

But views from above need not be so high to be transcendent, to momentarily transport you out of the reverie of your usual way of looking at the world. The High Line park, recently opened on the West Side of Manhattan, accomplishes no less of a shift in perspective, though only about 30 ft above the ground. Being up on the High Line shows how little a distance is necessary to give you a new view on things. It allows you to experience the city, which is normally so enveloping, as a semi-detached observer.

This is particularly true at the amphitheater, which creates an ironic kind of street theater looking up 10th Ave., reminding us of the spectacle that is New York City, and that however blasé we may become about living here, New Yorkers are part of a metropolis that inspires interest and curiosity in much of the world.

There is something about this middle distance view from the High Line — above the city, yet still very much in the city — that makes the shift in perspective all the more powerful. In a plane the landscape has a surreal quality, but from the High Line the city is both transformed and yet still very real. The people are not ants moving away from you at a rate so quick you can’t hold onto them; they are still people, but from that bird-on-a-wire view they are placed in context. They are also removed from time, in a way, where you see their movements circumscribed on the earth and the streets seem filled with patterns.

I love this quote, by Lisa Switkin, a landscape architect involved in the design of the High Line:

Someone said to me ‘have you noticed that people have a different pace when they are on the High Line?’ This made me smile, as I remember the supportive but skeptical reaction when we first stated our basic mantra of ‘Keep it Simple, Keep it Wild, Keep it Slow, and Keep it Quiet’ that inspired the design. ‘Can you even do that in New York?’ was a common response. And yet, it’s true; people do have a slower pace and sense of delay when they are on the line. They are suspended in a unique urban condition – both a part of the City and removed from the City at the same time. I hope the magical sense of surprise and bewilderment that the site produces itself, along with the legible and deliberate elongated transitions embedded into the design – from streetside to topside, hard to soft, woodland to grassland, river to city – give people the opportunity to see the City in new and unexpected ways; the familiar and iconic side as well as the up close, textural, and backside of New York City.

The design of the High Line is so wonderfully sensitive that it provides aesthetic opportunities for joy in many more ways than just this transcendent shift in perspective. As Switkin notes, the site does evoke a “magical sense of surprise and bewilderment,” from the charmingly aggressive way it cuts through buildings to the odd twists and turns to the landscaping which feels even wilder and more native than the local woods in our nearby suburbs.The High Line feels absurd, spontaneous, and vibrant, all joyful qualities.

The proof of joy in any design is in the way in makes people feel and behave, and in this, the High Line demonstrates its positive emotional worth. The High Line blog notes a “renegade cabaret” that has sprung up on a balcony neighboring the line, an entertaining phenomenon made possible by the almost-uncomfortable adjacency of the park to the surrounding buildings. It also talks about the first marriage proposal on the line. These are the true markers of joy in a space, joy that will endure past the initial exhilaration of its newness. Does a space make people want to break into song? Do people see it as a place they want to start their lives together? Do people behave in unexpected ways, ways that may surprise even themselves? Are people smiling, not from the thrill of discovery, but in the sheer pleasure of being there?

If so, then you might say you’ve designed a joyful space.