Let the Outside In from Caitlin Parker on Vimeo.
Oh wow. I love this weird, whimsical look into a world we usually pay no attention.
via @design_sponge
The scene in the photo above has the precious quality of a carefully constructed scale model, the meticulously crafted miniature boats floating in an inch-deep bay. But in fact, this fakeness is fake, because this is no model — it’s a real scene made to look tiny and toylike with the use of a Photoshop technique known as faux tilt-shift photography.
You can see many more examples like this on Flickr, in pools like this one, where tilt-shift enthusiasts showcase their best work. It’s especially amusing when tilt-shifters use photos with people in them, as in the one below. The people look like toy figurines, and it’s easy to forget for a moment that those are real people with names and lives, and not molded pieces of polystyrene.
It’s also wonderful when you see a familiar scene, like this typical New York City block, transformed through tilt-shift. This transformation, from familiar to strange, is at the heart of what’s joyful about tilt-shift. It’s about more than just getting the joke. Yes, there’s a moment of revelation where you discover what you’re looking at is actually a new perspective on something you know well. But jokes get old, punchlines fail to have the same impact once you know what’s coming, and yet these photos make me smile whenever I see them. I think it’s because the apparent scale shift jars us out of our customary position in relationship to the world around us. Through these distortions, we’re given a moment in which we can realize how small we are, how tiny even our biggest structures can seem, and this momentary change in perspective is liberating.
Photos, top to bottom: mellocakes, nurpax, agent j loves agent a
It starts with babies. Tiny people with tiny ears, tiny noses, and tiny toes. Tiny hats and shoes follow, and for some reason these ordinary things, shrunken down to impossible proportions, give us a big swell of joy.
Kids get bigger, but the miniaturization continues. Toy cars, soldiers, and animals fill our days, all perfect scale models of the real things. Dollhouses — entire worlds in miniature — involve us in hours of joyful play. And I don’t know if it’s because tiny things remind us of these toys and the freedom of childhood, or whether we have a purely visceral reaction to their comical scale, but it does seem that many miniatures have a joyful quality to them and we often seek to miniaturize things even in the adult world.
Think about cupcakes, a craze you’d have to live under a rock not to have noticed. In recent years these small doses of sweetness have been in such high demand by adults, they seem to be capable of keeping entire blocks of the West Village economically afloat. Fruit is getting smaller too. Clementines and cherry tomatoes have been around awhile, but there’s been a growing prevalence of those tiny apples and pears, and now apricots (which already seemed pretty tiny to me) have shrunken into candycots, and watermelons have gotten “personal-sized.”
There’s a pragmatic rationale for small urban cars, but it doesn’t explain why drivers of the Mini Cooper and the Smart car always seem so smiley. We also find miniatures associated with special occasions known to be joyous, such as Christmas ornaments, souvenirs of famous places, and those bride-and-groom caketop miniatures without which any wedding would surely be incomplete. These “tiny worlds” designed and sold on Etsy by Amy Powers seem take a cue from these inspirations, trying to distill moments of joy into something small, pure, and permanent.
Miniatures are like suggestions of another world, a world of a different scale, but often also a world of a different time or place. Like these miniature tuk-tuks (which, even at life-size, are already miniatures) ensconced in the lighting fixtures of New York Thai restaurant (top photo), they bring distant memories or dreams into a concrete physicality. They also work on a purely visceral level, transforming the world around them in powerful ways. These lamps would look quite ordinary, but the mini tuk-tuks make them look enormous, like giant soap bubbles in comparison. Much the way our hands look giant when held palm-to-palm with a child’s, or a Great Dane looks like horse next to a toy poodle, our world reveals itself to us in new ways in the presence of an out-of-scale element. There’s a transcendence in that feeling that the world is larger than life, or in feeling like we’ve become kids again.
I discovered William Eggleston, the iconoclast whose super-saturated prints brought color photography into art world’s mainstream, at the recent show at the Whitney Museum. The retrospective is now at the Corcoran in DC, bringing him back into the spotlight again and giving east-coasters who missed it in New York a second chance to see this wonderful body of work.
What’s joyful about Eggleston’s work? The unexpected hits of color, for starters. In this piece on NPR, Claire O’Neill writes about the transformative power of his color vision:
Although he doesn’t quite understand what people mean when they tell him, “You changed the way I see the world,” the fact remains that he has. Perhaps the living legend is an accidental genius, but before his lurid color prints hit the gallery walls, few people would have found beauty in their own rundown suburban backyards. Whether or not he meant to, and whether or not he cares, Eggleston has taught us to open our eyes and see the wide spectrum of colors around us. He says he doesn’t think much about it. But a few subtle winks and a glimmer in his eye tell me he knows exactly what he’s doing.
The article makes clear this approach was born out of Eggleston’s pure joy at seeing his world in vibrant color. Looking at his photographs, the energy seems to bleed off the print, an irrepressible vitality that stretches beyond the borders and makes each image feel hugely alive. But it also suggests Eggleston has the mischievous spirit of a kind of benign provocateur. Playfully transgressive, his goal is not to destabilize, but simply to liberate art from arbitrary rules that limit us from beauty in our own backyards.
Eggleston’s subjects are not always joyful; indeed, they often have a sort of forlorn or derelict beauty that inspires sad nostalgia rather than joy. Others are wonderfully weird, with an internal tension that asks you to consider joyful aesthetic elements — symbols of childhood, fluffy clouds or cotton candy, holiday motifs—in all their bizarre beauty, almost without emotion.
But regardless of the specific elements featured, to me the body of work as a whole exudes joy, arising as it does from the mind of a man who revels in color. In the audio slide show that accompanies the NPR piece, the final question is, “Do you dream in color?” There is such savory delight in the laugh that punctuates his response: “Oh yes. Wonderful pictures that don’t exist. I would love to print every single one of them. So. . . brilliant.”
From NPR, via tipster-extraordinare: Dad
It is out of control how much joy the world is putting out there today! I can’t keep up.
These polka dots were spotted on a pedestrian walkway in Times Square by my friend Maggie. She says, “The minute I saw them, esp as a New Yorker knowing they weren’t there before, definitely got a burst of JOY!”
Great find! They remind me of the purple footprints that appeared around the city in the 1980s. Does anyone know what these polka dots are all about? Is there a message or are they just for fun?
I’ve been writing more than a little about the notion of the absurd as a route to joy lately, and as far as absurd flowers go, the allium pretty much takes the cake. Poofy, sparkly orbs, disproportionately large yet still light and airy atop impossibly tall, straight stems — the allium looks like something that would grow on a newly discovered planet. Its family heritage is no less comical: the cheery allium is actually a variant of the onion, presenting a globe above ground while its cousin hides one below.
The allium is one flower that never fails to make me smile. But of course there are many joyful flowers. Poppies, with their irrational exuberance — bright, fragile, and abundant. Peonies, which are perhaps more stately, but lavish with their fragrance and the endless layers of petals that unfurl implausibly from those tight, hard buds. Lilacs, which appear in an intoxicating fog of scent, offering a pure glut of sensation for only a few weeks. Tulips, too, with their early spring color and their way of opening themselves so wide as to practically turn inside out, offering all before going bare for another year.
The whole idea of the flower is joyful. It is an alluring spectacle, an unfurling of vibrant energy, both excessive and necessary. Color, pattern, scent, texture, intricacy of design — in the flower, nature spared no aesthetic expense. Surely she could have evolved other (more efficient) ways for plants to reproduce, but how lucky we are that flowers evolved to be the dominant means!
Jell-O is an absurd food, and there is often something joyful about things that are a little bit absurd (to wit: flamingos, hula hooping, and those wonderful Wayne Thiebaud cake paintings). Everything about Jell-O is somewhat ridiculous — the name, for starters; the color, because no real food is ever that neon; the dancing wiggliness of it, its preposterous, inelegant, delightfully unpredictable movements.
So it should be no surprise that people are drawn to doing absurd things with it. The Gowanus Studio Space‘s Jell-O mold competition, held last weekend, challenged designers to work with the medium in a novel and engaging way. As a designer I was most impressed by the guy who roto-molded Jell-O spheres, which I think hold lots of joyful potential to be filled in surprising ways. But I was also taken with this Jell-O caviar, shown above, which apparently had a fishy taste to it (gross!). You can see these and more in this excellent video.
This is a great find by my friend Maggie. Two-thousand LED paving stones have been set in amongst the cobbles on the Place du Molard in Geneva. What a magical place!
These lit pavers disrupt our expectations in so many subtle ways. We are so used to light coming from above that lights from below seem to upend the world in a beautiful way. We also expect solidity and density from the stones under our feet, not translucency. And every day, there is the renewed joy of dusk — watching certain stones defy the graying landscape and come to life.
I love that the Best Made Co., makers of the wonderful axes in my previous post, list these polka-dotted cement mixers among their inspirations. Like the axes, they’re a great example of joyful aesthetics in a utilitarian context. A heavy, noisy cement mixer receives a totally different reception from passers by when clad in polka dots than the usual industrial gray. And no matter how many times you see them, they never seem to get old.
Photo from the photostream of So Cal Metro.
Not so appropriate for the urban jungle, perhaps, but I still find these joyful axes completely irresistible. Amazing how the cheeriness of the handle strips out all the violence of the blade. Also, a good example for me of how the aesthetics of joy know no age or gender, as I could see these in the hands of a young woman or slung over the shoulder of my dear old grandpa. Makes you want to get your hands dirty, and whistle while you work!
Axes from the Best Made Co. Via Daily Candy.
One of the questions people ask me all the time when I explain the Aesthetics of Joy is “How do I use this?” The book covers a number of specific strategies relating to designing and marketing more joyfully, but there’s one that’s almost too obvious to write about: having a joyful attitude.
The fail whale, Twitter’s now iconic graphic that appears during unplanned, accidental downtime, is a great example of this. When most sites go down they use a stock standard “We’re having technical difficulties and are working to resolve the problem. We apologize for the inconvenience.” Nothing wrong with that, but nothing joyful about it either. Twitter’s approach, on the other hand, to use whimsical imagery to convey the idea of overloaded servers, creates a small moment of transcendence in the user. By this I mean that the ordinary pattern of behavior (anger, frustration, percussive maintenance) is suspended because the enchanting vehicle of the message takes you out of your narrow prism and makes you consider that stepping away from the computer into the sunshine for a few hours might not be such a bad idea. Fail whale is a disruption that shifts your perspective, mood, and even behavior.
Fail whale seem to fill a cultural need for joy and humanity in our dealings with the corporate world, as evidenced by the craze it inspired, including t-shirts, sculptures, tattoos, and cupcakes. It’s become an emblem of joyful failure, a true disruption of our expectations around the ways in which companies behave.
Joyful design doesn’t change the message. But it can change the way the message is received, and the way users feel about your product. And if you have to disappoint your users, a dose of joy might just be the best way to sugar-coat it.