aesthetics of joy

It’s Sunday and it is too hot. Time to slow things down, people. I don’t know about you, but my feet did not touch the pavement this week. I was all over this city — eastside, westside, uptown, downtown, high line, subway, ferry, rooftop, sidewalk, garden. I’m putting on the afterburners today: yoga, worn-in clothes, air-dry hair, peanut butter out of the jar, counter-ripened peaches, herbal tea, naps (yes, plural), magazines (just the pictures), crossword puzzle, daydreams. And this video, in which it is very easy to simply get lost. A half-mad man blowing lovely, giant bubbles, about as slow and airy as my thoughts today.

I hope you’re finding some time to slow down and be joyful today. Tomorrow’s for running. Sit still while you can.

Yes, that is Desmond Tutu in the midst of all those children jumping on a bed! For a project called Play Jump Eat, Kelly Wainwright of Messy Monkey Arts managed to coax not just the Reverend Archbishop, but also fishermen, surfers, schoolkids, and others to let go of their inhibitions and be photographed in odd situations, bed-jumping.

Jumping on the bed is an example of a joyful pleasure at its most democratic: an activity that is accessible to nearly everyone. It’s a childish pleasure, one we associate with being small in the expanse of our parents’ beds, but it can be rediscovered at any time. (Confession: I sometimes can’t resist a jump or two in a hotel room.) There’s just something so totally liberating about jumping; it’s a slightly transgressive, freeing feeling that brings laughter and optimism up to the surface. Even just looking at these photos evokes a vicarious burst of delight!

I hope the full series will eventually be posted online. Read more about the project here.

{Via @vpostrel}

Update: Kelly pointed out to me that prints are available here and that a portion of the proceeds benefit the Tertia Kindo Arts Project, a children’s dance school. The comments also made me realize that I failed to credit Inge Prins, the photographer on the project. Lovely work!

Matt sent me these whimsical images of public structures “fixed” with legos. The pieces are done by artist Jan Vormann, in an attempt to “support Mayor Bloomberg in his everyday-struggle to make this city even more amazing!”

Between these and the precious potholes I featured a couple of weeks ago, I’m starting to see a theme around the idea of “joyful repair.” Add to these some of the initiatives at Droog’s takeover of Governor’s island last fall, such as Heleen Klopper’s Woolfiller, and there really seems to be a pattern. I see this as an emerging desire to salvage damaged things, to fill in gaps and holes with something beautiful, whimsical, and colorful. Of course, these are not serious attempts at repair (Woolfiller excepted), but they get us to pay more attention to our environment, and the condition of the world around us, in a joyful way. There’s something compelling about the motivation behind the work — the need to make something whole, and not just whole, but somehow better and brighter than it was. These pieces suggest that a repaired thing can be not just as good as, but better than a new thing, and for me, this is what makes these provocations go beyond humor and novelty to be truly, deeply joyful.

This whimsical series of photos by Jan von Holleben has me totally charmed. There’s something so sweet about the landlocked restaging of childhood fantasies of flight: Peter Pan, Superman, The Red Balloon, etc. It looks like it would be such fun to be one of the kids in the photos. It also highlights a connection I hadn’t noticed before — the link between childhood and a fascination with flight.

So many characters in children’s stories fly: superheroes, fairies, wizards. Many toys fly as well, from balloons to paper airplanes, kites to whirlygigs. There’s something enchanting, liberating about flight and I wonder if children are more fixated on flight or just less inhibited about imagining it. As we get older, the characters in our stories tend to keep their feet more firmly on the ground, and even our dreams seem to have less flying in them, or at least that is the case for me. As a child I used to spend many nights leaping through the air in REM sleep; now, I covet a dream where I even get a few feet off the ground.

It’s also interesting to me how these photos illustrate the joyful gestures of flying. If we take away the props and the settings, what’s left are splayed-out, arms-up gestures that stretch the body wide and open. With no context, you could still understand the form as those of bodies in flight. There is an exultant quality to these bodily shapes; they are delight in contour, revelry in sinew. Joy thrives in this unthreatened openness, this delicious expansion of a physical being into its space. It makes me wonder how we might incorporate more of these kinds of gestures, in stills or in movements, into everyday life.

Aside from babies, there really is nothing cuter in a costume than a dog. Cat lovers might dispute this, but cats are so reluctant, and their claws so sharp, and they always look so put upon. Dogs are lovably malleable and unaccountably cheerful in the face of whatever ridiculous ensemble we might devise for them.

No need to elaborate on the link between cuteness and joy (I’ve written about it here). Just head over to Flickrblog to see more costumed pooches grinning and bearing it.

Happy Halloween, and have a joyful weekend!

Xx Ingrid

The debut collection from the ladylike designers at Harvey Faircloth has a real joyful charm to it. It goes to show how you a few bright pops of color can bring a sense of cheekiness to an otherwise restrained look.

I also love when designers share their inspirations. Drawing from sources as varied as the Lascaux cave paintings and Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch, this clickable matrix really gives depth and story to the clothing.

Shop it here.

Defying the laws of gravity, the Boskke sky planter makes ordinary houseplants into magical specimens. Oddly joyful!

{via Oh Joy!}

New technologies and creative attention have liberated online retail from the tyranny of the grid in recent years. Here’s a particularly whimsical example, which somehow brings that perfectly curated Grandma’s attic vibe to your computer screen, and makes you feel like whatever you choose is an undiscovered treasure.

Anyone out there have examples of favorite unconventional online store formats that make them smile?

via @swissmiss

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

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.

Fail whale is designed by Yiying Lu. More info here.