Top Quotes: “Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness” — Ingrid Fetell-Lee
Introduction
“A body of research is emerging that demonstrates a clear link between our surroundings and our mental health. For example, studies show that people with sunny workplaces sleep better and laugh more than their peers in dimly-lit offices, and that flowers improve not only people’s moods but their memory as well.”
“These pleasures cut across lines of age, gender, and ethnicity. They weren’t joyful for just a few people. They were joyful for nearly everyone. I gathered pictures of these things and pinned them up on my studio wall. Each day I spent a few minutes adding new images, sorting them into categories and looking for patterns.
One day as I was studying them, something clicked. I saw lollipops, pom-poms, and polka dots, and it dawned on me: they were all round in shape. Vibrant quilts kept company with Matisse paintings and rainbow candies: all bursting with saturated color. A picture of a cathedral’s rose window puzzled me at first, but when I placed it next to a snowflake and a sunflower, it made sense: all had radiating symmetries. And the common thread about bubbles, balloons, and hummingbirds also became clear: they were all things that floated gently in the air. Setting it all laid out, I realized that though the feeling of joy is mysterious and ephemeral, we can access it it through tangible, physical attributes. Specifically, it’s what designers call aesthetics — the properties that define the way an object looks and feels — that give rise to the feeling of joy.”
“In all, I identified ten aesthetics of joy, each of which reveals a distinct connection between the feeling of joy and the tangible qualities of the world around us:
Energy: vibrant color and light
Abundance: lushness, multiplicity, and variety
Freedom: nature, wilderness, and open space
Harmony: balance, symmetry, and flow
Play: circles, spheres, and bubbly forms
Surprise: contrast and whimsy
Transcendence: elevation and lightness
Magic: invisible forces and illusions
Celebration: synchrony, sparkle, and bursting shapes
Renewal: blossoming, expansion, and curves”
“The power of the aesthetics of joy is that they speak directly to our unconscious minds, bringing out the best in us without our even being aware of it.
How can you tell if your surroundings are joyful or not? Think about these questions:
How often do you laugh?
When was the last time you felt a true, unfettered moment of joy?
What emotions do you feel when you walk into your home at the end of the day? How about when you enter each room?
How highly does your significant other or family value joy?
Who are the most joyful people in your life? How often do you see them?
How often do you find joy in your work?
Do you work for a company that’s pro-joy, joy-neutral, or anti-joy? How appropriate is it to laugh out loud at your workplace?
What activities bring you the most joy? How often do you engage in them? Can you do them at or near your home?
How much joy do you find in the town or city where you live? In your specific neighborhood?
What are your ‘happy places’? Are any within 10 miles of your home? When was the last time you visited one?”
Energy
“In fall 2000, a crew of painters covered a historic building in Tirana, Albania, with vibrant orange paint. A shade between tangerine and Tang swallowed up the old facade, spreading over stone and cement indiscriminately, sparing only the windows. The painting began in the morning, and by midday a crowd of onlookers has massed, gaping in the street. Traffic came to a halt. Bewildered, some spectators shouted while others burst out laughing, shocked to see such bold color amid the gray.
For all the commotion, the painting might’ve seemed a prank by a particularly brazen mischief-maker. But this wasn’t an act of graffiti, and the commissioning artist was no ordinary street vandal. He was the mayor.
Edi Rama won the World Mayor Award in 2004 for his stunning success at restoring the capital city of Albania, just years after he was elected. Visit Tirana today, ad you’ll see few traces of the filthy, dangerous city that Rama inherited when he took office. Broken by decades of repressive dictatorship, and starved of resources by 10 years of chaos after the fall of Communist rule, by the late 90s, Tirana had become a haven for corruption and organized crime. Pickpockets and prostitutes loitered on corners. Garbage piled uncollected in the streets. As Rama had described it, ‘The city was dead. It looked like a transit station where one could stay only if waiting for something.’
The painted buildings were an act of desperation by a mayor faced with an empty treasury and a demoralized populace. An artist by training, Rama sketched the first designs himself, choosing vibrant hues and gaudy patterns that disrupted the bleakness of the urban landscape. The orange building was joined by others as Rama’s project quickly spread throughout the city, enveloping public and private buildings alike.
At first, the reactions were mixed: some were horrified, others curious, a few delighted. But soon after, strange things began to happen. People stopped littering in the streets. They started to pay their taxes. Shopkeepers removed the metal grates from their windows. They claimed the streets felt safer, even though there were no more police than before. People began to gather in cafes again and talk of raising their children in a new kind of city.
Nothing had changed, except on the surface. A few patches of red and yellow, turquoise and violet. And yet everything had changed. The city was alive, ebullient, joyful.”
“Broadly speaking, when psychologists use the word ‘joy,’ they mean an intense, momentary experience, one that can be recognized by certain telltale signs: smiling, laughing, an a feeling of wanting to jump up and down. While contentment is curled up on the sofa, and bliss is lost in tranquil meditation, joy is skipping, jiving, twirling, giggling. It’s a uniquely exuberbant emotion, a high-energy form of happiness.”
“The liveliest places and objects all have one thing in common: bright, vivid color. Whether it’s a row of houses painted in bold swaths of candy hues or a display of colored markers in a stationery shop, vibrant color invariably sparks a feeling of delight. Bright color adorns festivals around the world, and it almost seems as if the more intense the colors, the more intense the joy. In China, bright dancing dragons usher in the new year, while Brazil’s Carnival dazzles with brilliant feathered costumes. During India’s Holi festival, people dispense with decorations and instead throw handfuls of pure colored powder, creating a stunning spectacle of polychromatic smoke that stains grinning revelers from toe to toe.”
“While the eyes of their nocturnal cousins had only 2 types of color-sensing cone cells, our ancestors evolved a third cone, sensitive to light in the middle of the spectrum, that radically multiplied the number of colors they were able to see. This extra cone offered up a tantalizing array of new shades, including the ability to distinguish red from green. Eventually this capability would come in handy in helping us tell the difference between ‘stop’ and ‘go’ on a traffic light, but its immediate benefit to our primate ancestors was far more significant. That’s because scientists believe it allowed them to identify sugar-rich ripe fruits and nutritious young leaves in the dense foliage of the treetops they inhabited. (Young leaves are often tinted red because they contain anthocyanin pigments that haven’t yet been marked by chlorophyll.) Research suggests that color vision provided such an advantage that our ancestors’ brains evolved a reduced capacity for processing smells in order to allow for an increase in the handling of visual info. Far from being a luxury, color vision is so vital to our survival that we sacrificed other senses to have more of it.”
“Color is energy made visible. It activates an ancient circuit that lights up with pleasure at the idea of finding something sweet to eat. Now, in a world that contains rainbows of artificial colors, we still feel the same joy, even if a colorful object contains no physical nourishment. More broadly, color is an indication of the richness of our surroundings. It’s an unconscious signal not only of immediate sustenance but of an environment that’s capable of sustaining us over time.”
“I realized that the colors prompted an unconscious change in people’s relationship to their environment: from fight or flight to stay and grow. In 5 years, the number of businesses in Tirana tripled, and tax revenue increased by a factor of 6. The increased tax revenue paid for public development projects, like tearing down 5,000 buildings that had been illegally erected in public spaces and planting 4,000 trees. Journalists visiting the city in the year or so after the first paintings observed that the desolate streets that had once been havens for crime were bustling with activity, people sitting in cafes and strolling in parks.”
“Over 20 years, Publicolor has painted 400+ schools and community centers, received awards from the White House and the city, and counts many school principals among its fans.
Schools are complex systems, making it challenging to isolate the impact of color on academic outcomes. Nevertheless, anecdotal evidence reveals that significant changes follow in the wake of a Publicolor intervention. Graffiti almost completely disappears, and principals report that both student and teacher attendance improves. Some principals say they have noticed a difference in test scores as well. Perhaps the most surprising finding is that teachers and students consistently say they feel safer in a school that has been painted by Publicolor. Just like the shop owners in Tirana who removed the metal grates from their windows, students and teachers find that the brightly-colored walls ease their perception of danger in the space. Perhaps feeling safe frees up more mindshare for teaching and learning, which translates to more-focused students and better-performing ones.
I also suspect there may be another effect at play. Bright color operates like a stimulant, a shot of caffeine for the eyes. It stirs us out of complacency. Artist Fernand Leger related the story of a newly-renovated factory in Rotterdam. ‘The old factory was dark and sad,’ he noted. ‘The new one was bright and colored: transparent. Then something happened. Without any remark to their personnel, the clothes of the workers became neat and tidy…They felt that an important event had just happened around them, within them.’ Comprehensive research on color and the workplace suggests that Leger’s observations play out at scale. In a study of nearly 1k people in Sweden, Argentina, South Africa, and the UK, people working in bright, colorful offices were more alert than those working in duller spaces. They were also more joyful, interested, friendly, and confident. The drab tones of most school buildings and offices are understimulating, leading to restlessness and difficulty concentrating. The liveliness of color helps us marshal the energy we need to learn, be productive, and grow.
Publicolor involves students and administrators in the process of choosing the colors for their schools, but over the years the org has developed a signature palette that features citrusy yellows, greens, and oranges, with accents of turquoise and salmon pink.”
“A saturated color is its purest version, the kind you might find on a children’s building-block set. The truest blue and the sunniest yellow: these colors are strong and intense. To desaturate colors, you add gray to them, making them duller versions of themselves. Spring green becomes olive. Beige is a desaturated yellow — a yellow with all the joy sucked out of it! Gray is the ultimate desaturated color, containing only white and black. Desaturated colors can be useful as part of a color scheme, but if you look around and all you see are grays and khakis and beiges, then your surroundings are pretty drab. The lightness of a color has to do with how much white or black is mixed into it. Adding white makes a color lighter and more reflective, while adding black makes it darker and more muted. Light pink and sky blue are more energizing than burgundy and navy because they reflect more light, imbuing a space with life. Dark, desaturated colors absorb light, bringing down the energy in a space.”
“‘People use open space if it’s sunny, and don’t use it if it isn’t, in all but desert climates.’ In a study of Berkeley residential streets, Alexander found that residents on the north side of the street didn’t use their backyards. Instead, they sat in the small front yards next to the sidewalk while the backyards collected junk. Shaded yards and plazas create dead zones, while those that face south ensure ‘the building and its gardens will be happy places full of activity and laughter.’ The same is true indoors. Because the sun travels from east to west across the southern half of the sky, houses where the most important rooms face south tend to be cheerful and convivial. Meanwhile, homes where the main roms face north are often dark and gloomy, causing people to retreat from the common areas toward the lighter rooms at the edges of the house. (This is reversed in the S. Hemisphere.)
The joy we find in a sunlit room is matched by tangible measures of well-being. Research consistently shows that increasing exposure to daylight reduces blood pressure and improves mood, alertness, and productivity. Employees who sit near windows report higher energy levels and tend to be more physically active both in and out of the office. In a study of elementary schools, students in classrooms with the most daylight advanced as much as 26% faster in reading and 20% faster in math over the course of a year. Hospital patients assigned to sunnier rooms were discharged sooner and required fewer pain meds than those in rooms with less light.
Sunlight is best, but when it isn’t available, broad-spectrum artificial light can provide similar benefits. Scientists have known for years that seasonal depression can be alleviated by spending up to an hour a day in front of a glowing box that radiates 2,500 lux, but newer research shows that light therapy can be effective for nonseasonal depression as well. In a meta-analysis of 20 studies, researchers reached the startling conclusion that light therapy can be as effective at treating depression as antidepressants. And among Alzheimer’s patients in long-term care, bright light reduced both depression and cognitive decline. Yet because light isn’t as lucrative a remedy as pharmaceuticals, there has been much less research into these treatments.”
“Studies affirm that people generally prefer lighting that’s variable, rather than uniform. These hills and valleys of light attract our eyes to POIs within a space, but even more important, they draw us together. Because people are unconsciously attracted to light, the brightest spots will be the ones where people congregate, making these the most lively and joyful hubs of activity in a space. If a space feels dead, a powerful remedy is to create focal points of light where you want people to be. A sofa by the fireplace, a window seat, a dining table bathed in the warm light of a pendant lamp: these places are always alive because we, like moths, cannot resist the light.”
“Choosing bulbs with a CRI close to 100 will keep you and your spaces looking bright and colorful.”
Abundance
“For the thousands of generations of early humans who foraged and hunted for subsistence, even a gas station mini-mart would be a wealth of riches. Their lives cycled through unpredictable periods of sufficiency and devastating scarcity. In this seesaw of daily existence, it seems only natural that humans developed a predilection for abundance. This ensured that people would take advantage of a windfall when it came, shoring up resources for the lean times that would inevitably follow. Those who reveled in abundance were more likely to survive than those who were indifferent to it, encoding this preference deep in our genes. Though we inhabit a very different world from our hunter-gatherer ancestors, we carry the legacy of their fragile subsistence when we pig out at buffets and buy too much at clearance sales.”
“Scientists count somewhere between 12 and 21 [senses]. We have senses of time, equilibrium, and direction. We have internal senses, like stretch sensors that can tell us when our bodies are full and proprioception, which tells us where our bodies are in space. The sense that we call touch actually comes from 4 distinct receptors — pain, temperature, pressure, and tactility — which combine to give us a remarkably robust sense of the world.”
“The potential therapeutic value of sensory stimulation is well known in Europe, particularly in the Netherlands, where a therapy called Snoezelen is used to treat developmental disabilities, brain injury, and dementia. Snoezelen, a portmanteau of 2 charmingly onomatopoeic Dutch words, snuffelen (to smell) and doezelen (to doze), is a practice of creating multisensory environments and letting patients gravitate to sensations that feel good to them. Snoezelen rooms look a little bit like psychedelic lounges from the 70s, complete with cushy furniture, swirly holograms, moving light displays, and colorful bubbling tubes of water that resemble lava lamps. Many include aromas, like orange or strawberry, and music as well. Trippy as they seem, the intensely pleasurable sensations they offer can have a real influence on mood and behavior, without the side effects that come with meds. Caregivers report that the sensations bring dementia patients out of a withdrawn state. Their eyes snap open; they reach for things; they laugh. Research on Snoezelen therapy is still in its early stages, but studies show that adding sessions of it to standard psychiatric care reduces apathy and agitation among elderly dementia patients, and it alters neurological activity of brain-injured patients in ways similar to meditation. In Canada, some long-term care facilities have found Snoezelen helpful in reducing their need to control problem behaviors with antipsychotic drugs.”
“It’s almost as if the craving for sensations is inexorable and can be held at bay for only so long. Architect Oscar Niemeyer learned a similar lesson through the planned city of Brasilia. Intended as a symbol of Brazil’s orderly and egalitarian future, the new city featured massive, identical apartment blocks in neat geometric rows. Gone were the slums and the traffic, and in their place was a clean, spacious, modern city. But when residents moved in, they found the big apartment blocks sterile and disorienting. As urbanist Charles Montgomery writes, ‘They missed their old, cramped market streets, places where disorder and complexity led to serendipitous encounters with sights, scents, and other people.’ Over time, the city sprawled out, and new barrios were created that resembled the old, abundant way of living.”
“While many cultures typically view black as the color of mourning, some prefer to celebrate the lives of deceased loved ones with color. In Guatemalan towns such as Chichicastenango, family members paint graves with their loved one’s favorite colors, refreshing them each year as a way to honor the departed. The result is a rainbow cemetery that feels like a vibrant city and a place to celebrate life, rather than a monument to death.
Rainbows are indefatigable soldiers for the cause of joy, ones that can puncture deep despair. They swell into the empty spaces in our lives — blighted downtowns, oppressed communities, or hearts ravaged by loss — adn send up a signal flag of hope.”
“It turns out that the word ‘gaudy’ has roots in the Latin gaudere, ‘to rejoice’ or to ‘delight’ in something, which happens to be the same root that gave us the word ‘joy.’ Choosing abundance is not a moral failing. It’s an expression of deep, human delight. It’s an acknowledgement that we’re here to do more than eke out an existence between birth and death and chores. We’re here, as Diane Ackerman writes, to live not just the length of our lives, but the width of them as well. We’re here to see rainbows and paint them, to be tickled and enthralled, to eat a second cupcake if we choose. And, occasionally, to feel the truth of Mae West’s famous aphorism, that ‘too much of a good thing can be wonderful.’”
Freedom
“Indoors, the thick, insulated walls and HVAC systems remove the gentle fluctuations of temperature, scent, air, and humidity that make being outdoors such a delight. Being in nature liberates our senses.”
“More people visit zoos each year than professional sporting events. 68% of American households have 1 or more pets.”
“Spending time in nature decreases blood flow to a part of the brain called the subgenual prefrontal cortex, which is associated with the tendency to brood over problems. Natural settings literally make us more carefree.”
“Recording of natural sounds have been used to calm patients at a children’s hospital, ease the stresses of travel at an airport lounge, and relieve pain. Birdsong has even been piped into gas station restrooms, a move that purportedly raised customer-satisfaction ratings. One possible explanation is that we evolved to rely on ambient sounds, particularly birdsong, as indicators of the safety of our environment. Before a big storm, or in other dangerous moments, birds flee, and the world goes eerily quiet. The noise of business as usual among the animals lets us know we’re free to play and explore.”
Harmony
“Joy is the brain’s natural reward for staying alert to correlations and connections in our surroundings.
This principle helps explain why collections feel so joyful. Even if the individual items don’t have much value, our eyes read a collection as more than the sum of its parts.”
“Since the eye naturally looks for similar features, if you can find a common thread between objects, you can make them feel like they belong together. The common element can be size, color, shape, or material. In my house, I realized I often had similar things living in different places for no good reason. For example, I had a turquoise vase in my bedroom, turquoise books on the shelf, and a pair of turquoise matchbooks in the kitchen. When I gathered these items together and placed them on the entryway table, it transformed them from random pieces of junk into a delightful vignette.
I use this principle in my life in many small ways. For example, when I put things on a bulletin board or on a fridge door, I like to use pins or magnets of the same color. This way I can put up a hodgepodge of greeting cards, pages torn from magazines, or other found objects, and they all look as if they’re part of a single composition. A small luxury, but one that will last a lifetime, is to buy matching hangers for your closet. This has the effect of unifying the clothes, making them look as coordinated as they do when they’re hanging in the store. If you happen to like mismatched things, such as antique dishes or silverware, look for pieces that are roughly the same size to make them feel more like they belong to a set.”
“Repeating colors, shapes, or textures in different parts of a room helps our eyes view the room as a whole, rather than a mishmash of disconnected things. This is important because research shows that we’re attracted to environments with a moderately high degree of complexity, but only if the complexity is well-structured. The greater the complexity in an environment, the greater the need for an underlying harmony to bring a sense of order and ease to a space.”
“Research suggests that people prefer sitting at a slight angle to one another, rather than side by side, and that they’ll drag chairs into a loose circle whenever possible. The circle’s unbroken perimeter and even rate of curvature make it the most stable, complete, and inclusive shape. But the circle is joyful for another reason: it’s infinitely symmetrical.”
“If the architecture of your space doesn’t give you symmetry, you can create your own. By placing pairs of similar objects, such as chairs or potted plants, on either side of a line that you define, you can make an axis of symmetry where none exists. This axis can be measured from the center of a wall or prominent architectural feature, such as a fireplace mantle or built-in bookcase. Make sure that furniture, rugs, and light fixtures are centered on this axis. Research suggests the most salient axis of symmetry is the vertical, likely because it’s the one across which our own bodies are reflected. Mirrors, especially large ones, create instant vertical symmetry because they reflect the space back on itself. We’re less attuned to horizontal symmetry, but it, too, can add harmony to a space. Dorothy Draper always recommended lining up the tops of lampshades to the same height in a room, creating a subtle horizontal axis. If that’s too persnickety for you, then simply making sure that surfaces are level and artworks are aligned is a good start. Often, it works best to align pictures by the tops of their frames, but this isn’t always the case, so when in doubt, trust your eye.”
“Whether sonic or visual, patterns are a timeless source of joy. One of the reasons we love patterns and rhythms is that their structured repetition of elements quickly establishes a baseline level of harmony. Patterns enable us to experience an abundance of sensation without it feeling overwhelming, and they create an orderly background against which we can detect when something is out of place or awry. This lets our brain relax, rather than having to remain on high alert.”
“The orderly layouts featured on his sites have roots in 2 practices: knolling and mise en place. Knolling is a system of placing objects, usually tools, at right angles to one another on a work surface. It originated in Frank Gehry’s furniture workshop in the late 1980s and was popularized by artist Tom Sachs. Mise en place, which is French for ‘putting in its place,’ is a similar practice used in professional kitchens to set up for a shift by neatly laying out all ingredients and tools that will be needed. Both knolling and mise en place are strategies that enable smooth workflow, allowing workers to see and use materials in a fluid way. But the by-product of arranging things for good workflow is that they have good visual flow, with no awkward angles and plenty of negative space that lets the eye move around easily.
Knowing how powerful these techniques are, I’ve started to use them in ordinary moments. When I cut up an apple for a snack, I’ll arrange the pieces in a circle rather than piling them messily on the plate. Or I’ll knoll my desk at the end of the week so that it looks and feels ready for me when I come back to it on Monday.”
“She told me that feng shui places special emphasis on the entryway because it’s the gateway to your home or office. You have to pass through it every time you enter or exit, and it’s where you greet guests. If your door sticks or you’re always tripping over shoes, then you’re going to find friction at a moment when you really want momentum. This is mental, but it’s physical, too. Instead of flowing smoothly out of the house in the morning, your body will absorb the force from that friction. This might make you grit your teeth or tense your muscles, which in turn might influence the way you handle traffic on your commute or how you greet your coworkers when you arrive at the office. It’s a small moment that can have knock-on effects throughout your day. The same thing happens in reverse when you come home at night. Entering your home through a patch of chaos creates a moment of irritation that affects the rest of your evening.”
“If your environment makes you feel stable, balanced, and grounded, you’re more likely to feel confident taking measured risks and exploring new opportunities. Other people may notice your calm, unhurried demeanor and be drawn to you. And orderly surroundings also make you less likely to engage in behaviors that can undermine others’ trust in you, like lying or cheating.”
“Nestled into a crook of the Alabama River, the all-black enclave of Gee’s Bend was once a cotton plantation owned by a man named Mark Pettway. After emancipation, most of the population kept the name Pettway and stayed on as sharecroppers, often struggling with devastating poverty. Only one road goes in and out of the town (now known as Boykin). The main lifeline is a ferry across the river, but service was suspended in the 60s when residents went across to Camden attempting to register to vote and wasn’t reinstated until 2006. Gee’s Bend women have been quilting since at least the 20s, but it wasn’t until an intrepid collector named William Arnett began visiting the area in the 70s that the uniqueness of their quilts started to gain broad recognition. Many have been exhibited at museums across the country; most sell for upward of $5,000.”
Play
“I took out a highlighter and traced the circle of a hula-hoop and the perimeter of a spinning top. I drew along the edge of a kiddie pool photographed from above, a cool blue circle. The Ferris Wheel, the merry-go-round, the game of ring-around-the-rosy, all describe circular arcs. Bubbles, balls, and balloons: all round. Aesthetically, the story of childhood is the story of the circle and the sphere.
Round forms are magnetic, especially to children, and often become toys no matter their original purpose.”
“Circular and spherical objects have been used as toys for thousands of years. A circle made of vines, resembling a modern hula-hoop, was used as a toy by Egyptian children as far back as 1000BC. Mesoamerican cultures play a game with a rubber ball called ulama that dates back to at least 1600BC, making it one of the oldest continuously-played sports in the world. Ball games were also common in ancient Greece and Rome. Break out a ball, and a dog, a chimp, or a dolphin will try to play with it. Sea lions even play with puffer fish as if they were beach balls.”
“As children grow, they must navigate between opposing goals: safety and exploration. Learning about the world requires hands-on engagement, but this entails a certain amount of risk. Playful objects help resolve this tension, promoting discovery without subjecting the player to unnecessary danger.
Circles and spheres are the most approachable shapes, with no sharp edges to risk injury. Our emotional brain understands this intuitively and unconsciously prefers round forms over angular ones. Research has shown that people implicitly associate curved forms with safety and positivity, while associating sharp angles with danger and negativity. A 2007 study uncovered a potential source of this response: heightened activation in a part of the limbic system called the amygdala, a small, almond-shaped structure known to be involved in fear processing. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers revealed that the right amygdala lit up when subjects looked at an angular object, such as a square dish or sharp-cornered chair, but stayed quiet when they looked at a curved version of the same object. They speculate that because sharp objects in our environment, such as teeth or thorns, represented potential sources of danger to our ancestors, we’ve evolved to respond to angled contours with an unconscious level of caution.
As any parent of a crawling infant quickly learns, sharp objects don’t make a playful house. ‘Childproofing’ companies market all manner of stick-on bumpers that new parents can use to swaddle their angular furniture in soft form. But a home full of angles isn’t just hazardous to a child. It sets everyone subtly on edge. Sharp angles slow our movement and increase the sense of formality in a space. You don’t break into spontaneous happy dances in the living room where you risk splitting your shin on the coffee table, and you don’t do a running jump to join your partner in bed when you might catch your foot on the corner of the bedpost. Because hard angles inhibit joyful movement, they also decrease flow, and I wasn’t surprised to find that feng shui practitioners discourage using them in the home. [One[ goes so far as to recommend houseplants with rounded rather than spiky leaves.”
“Round shapes do just the opposite. A circular or elliptical coffee table changes a living room from a space for sedate, restrained interactions to a lively center for conversation and impromptu games. A large rubber exercise ball used instead of a desk chair does more than improve core strength and posture. It can also create a sense of playfulness in an office, especially if several workers choose to use them. Pom-poms sewn along the edges of curtains or pillows make them irresistibly playful and tactile, while polka dots and penny tiles do double duty, mixing play with abundance. Even flowers can be playful a bouquet of pom-pom dahlias, or yellow, ball-shaped billy buttons brings play together with the natural textures of the freedom aesthetic.
I’ve slowly been adding round spaces to my apartment: a spherical light fixture here, a circular mirror there. Of course, sometimes a rectangular profile will work better in the space you have. If you find this to be the case, you can still soften the edges by choosing a design with curved corners. This is a common strategy employed by toy makers: many toys are simply rounded versions of cars, tools, and other everyday objects. But this doesn’t have to mean making your house look like a toy store. By using more subdued materials, such as wood or marble, and limiting the use of primary colors, you can incorporate the playfulness of rounded shapes without the kindergarten feel.”
“When creating objects for everyday life, designers usually try to limit the affordances so that the object’s function is clear to the person using it. For example, a door with a bar-shaped handle has affordances that suggest it can be pulled or pushed. Because both actions look equally possible, manufacturers often have to supplement with a PULL or PUSH label. But when you see a door with a flat metal plate, you know automatically to push, because that’s the only action available to you. Everyday objects with limited affordances help us more easily make our way through the world. But because play involves undirected activity and a search for novelty, the best toys are those that can be used in a wide variety of ways. This explains why found objects such as rocks and sticks make such attractive play-things, and why snow is so joyful: it changes the affordances of the landscape, turning an ordinary surface into something that can be scooped, slid across, and shaped into an endless variety of forms.
Of all toys, balls have the broadest affordances. They contact the ground at only one point, thereby reducing friction and making them dynamic and unpredictable. Balls roll, twirl, spin, and bounce. They can be hit or kicked, whacked with a stick or shot through a hoop, volleyed with rackets or bare hands. 2 kids with a ball and limited supervision can come up with an entire Olympics’ worth of new sports in an afternoon. Round objects offer unique potential for discovery and delight.
Perhaps another reason that curves feel so playful is that they echo the movements we make when we play. Children run in swooping arcs, and when engaged in rough-and-tumble play, they signal that they’re not dangerous to their playmates by subtly rounding their movements, instead of moving in straight lines. According to Stuart Brown, curvilinear movements send the message that we’re operating in the land of the ‘not real,’ making it safe to engage.”
“Circular layouts make parties more enjoyable. They increase movement, reducing the likelihood of guests getting stuck in a corner and making it easier to mingle. It seems circular movement is joyful, even for adults.”
“It’s strange to think that a few curvy lines on a page or a screen can bring on a genuine pang of playfulness and affection. Those lines take advantage of a psychological quirk known as peak shift effect, which can lead us to respond to an exaggerated stimulus even more strongly than the real thing. Many animals are susceptible to this effect. Some birds, for example, will ignore their own nestlings to feed a fake baby bird beak on a stick, as long as the fake beak is redder and wider than those of their chicks. The peak shift effect explains why bobblehead dolls are so delightful and why googly eyes make catci (or anything else) so terribly disarming. They possess a hyperpotent form of cuteness that we’re hardwired to find irresistible.
I soon realized that ordinary objects could piggyback on our natural receptivity to cute features. The Fiat 500 and Mini Cooper are both terribly cute cars, inspiring deep affection on the part of their owners. A recent study compared images of the fronts of cars with similar images that had been altered to create a more baby-faced look, by enlarging the headlights (usually seen as eyes) and shrinking the grille and air vent (correlating to nose and mouth). Researchers discovered that looking at the cute cars triggered a subtle activation of the zygomaticus major muscle, one of the primary muscles involved in smiling. The cute typeface Comic Sans remains incredibly popular, despite being ridiculed by designers, because of its rounded, childish forms, which seem to take the edge off of whatever message it’s conveying. Cute gadgets, sometimes called cutensils, bring this playful feeling to mundane objects such as kitchen tools, tableware, and tech accessories.”
“People were asked to trace a drawing either with swooping lines that forced their arms to move in fluid curves or angular lines that produced herky-jerky movements. Then they were given a creative task. Participants who moved fluidly were able to generate more ideas for uses of a newspaper, and the ideas they came up with were more original. (For example, a typical use of a newspaper might be to cover the floor with it when training a puppy. An original idea might be to use it to transfer text onto wet nail polish.) Curvilinear movements seemed to unlock a more flexible thought pattern, which in turn heightened creativity. Subsequent studies revealed that curved movements decreased rigidity in other types of thought patterns. Curves made people more likely to believe that racial categories were socially constructed and elastic, rather than biological and fixed, and less likely to make discriminatory judgments about others based on stereotypes.”
“Games or activities that get your body moving in curvy acts — playing catch, hula-hooping, or even doing the actual hula — could be a way to encourage more innovative ideas and open-minded collaboration in the workplace. It may even be enough to be in a place where you can simply look at curves. In several of the studies mentioned above, participants didn’t actually make fluid movements with their arms. Instead, they watched a video of a red circle making curved motions on a screen. While more research is needed, this raises the possibility that spaces with curvy lines might induce the eye to move in ways that prompt fluid thought.”
“The separation of work and play is a false construct. ‘The opposite of play is not work,’ he says. ‘It’s depression.’”
“If you don’t have much control over your workplace, a piece of art featuring a flowing design or some curvy desk accessories could bring more curvilinear elements into your space. I keep a collection of tiny wooden tops on my desk. Whenever I get stuck on a problem, I spin them, and they make me feel like my thoughts are still flowing.
Curves play a vital role in a recently-redesigned school: Sandy Hook in CT. After the devastating shooting in 2012 that killed 20 children and 8 adults, the town decided to raze the original brick building and design a new one. The need for security was at the forefront of everyone’s mind — a long list of new safety regulations had been mandated by the state — and the resulting building could easily have resembled a fortress. Instead it feels like a pair of arms stretched out in welcoming embrace. The floor plan of the school is curved, with the building’s spine bowing gently in toward the parking lot. The curved shape of the school isn’t only playful but also acts as a subtle security feature, giving staff members in the admin offices at one end of the building a view into the classrooms at the other. A wavy line of two-tone wood cladding runs the length of the facade, and the staggered windows seem almost to bounce softly up and down with it. Squiggly canopies cover the entrances to the school.”
“Hesse whisked us through the house, up and down stairs, along winding pathways, into and out of many bedroom, each decorated by a different young artist. The beds were all circular, covered with tailored quilts in shades of raspberry, mint, and periwinkle, each piled with a small mound of pillows that looked like candies. We followed him down a sweeping hallway to the heart of the house, a living and dining space built at a more intimate scale. There was a round living room with a C-shaped sofa, a dining area that held a circular table with a built-in lazy Susan, and my favorite, a breakfast nook encased in a bubble that could be unlatched and swiveled open for poolside dining.”
“I followed the curve around, up more steps, and into another bedroom, its walls lined with navy-blue carpet and inset with curving shelves that housed glass vases colored like semi-precious stones: amethyst, lapis, turquoise. A strip of salmon-colored carpet patterned with giant dots led me into a sun-filled lounge with a ring of curvy red plastic chairs as glossy as candy apples. A squiggle-shaped ladder caught my eye, and I climbed it. A new path appeared, and I followed it. The house looped me around and around, as if I were playing hide-and-seek with myself.
The language of buildings fails me when trying to describe [The Bubble House]. The spherical volumes felt more like vessels than rooms. They spilled into each other gently, at elliptical intersections that resembled portals rather than doorways. Walls and ceilings met not in hard lines but in soft arcs and gibbous shapes. Rooms didn’t stack into levels, but nestled together like soap bubbles in foam. This gentle, undulating structure was a direct result of Lovag’s unorthodox method of design and construction. Instead of following the traditional architectural practice of drawing up precise blueprints, he would arrive on-site with a construction crew and no defined plan. He and his crew would create spheres out of steel mesh, the armatures for the various spaces in the home, and then roll them into place like beach balls. It was construction as play, an improvisational process that allowed the architect to try out different arrangements.”
Surprise
“Joyful surprises bring our attention away from ourselves and back out into the world, prompting us to approach and engage. They incite curiosity, spur exploration, and increase the chances we’ll interact with others in ways that keep the positive vibes flowing.”
“Many surprises are subtle: the pastel color of an Easter egg hidden in a bush, the music emanating from a new restaurant opening in your area, the particular size and shape of a thank-you note among the junk mail. I began to look for aesthetics that could heighten these kinds of gentle surprises and weave them more deeply into everyday life.”
“Legos don’t fix crumbling infrastructure, nor do a few plants in a pothole fix run-down roads. But small, surprising interventions can be gateways to broader community engagement. Surprise functions like a spotlight, illuminating a problem in a joyful way. Poet Mary Oliver writes, ‘Attention is the beginning of devotion.’ The moment that something captures our attention, we cease to become detached from it. We see it, we engage with it, and perhaps we become involved.”
“The principle of contrast can be used to animate overlooked areas and shake up tired experiences. One day I was walking in Manhattan when I saw a station wagon that had a jumble of bright, magnetic letters on the back, like those from a child’s play set, out of which someone had spelled the words SOCKS, WOW, and ADVENTURE. The letters turned the back of the car into a game for people walking by and gave the owners the surprise of seeing what new words were spelled out whenever they returned to their car. In Paris, a pizza place called Pink Flamingo gives customers a pink balloon when they order a pie to go. Customers can go find a picnic spot on the nearby Canal Saint-Martin, and Pink Flamingo will deliver their pizza right to tehm and their balloon, a process far more poetic than being handed one of those buzzing coasters.”
“When I visited Vivian’s studio, I noticed a white ceramic vase that had a ring of neon-pink masking tape around it. She told me that the vase had broken and that this was her way of fixing it, rather than just throwing it out. This was a technique she used often when things broke, and it reminded me a of the Japanese art of kintsugi, or ‘golden joinery,’ a method of repairing cracked pottery with a vein of lacquer mixed with gold or silver. A plausible origin story dates this art to the 15th century, when Japanese shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa broke his favorite tea bowl and sent it back to China to be repaired. It was returned with ugly metal staples, prompting the shogun to order his craftsmen to find a more aesthetic means of repair. I love the idea that an accident can be an occasion to make something more delightful, not less so. There are many other ways to practice this art of joyful repair. For example, one of my friends never worries when a button falls off her clothes. She just replaces it with a similar button in a different color, giving her clothes a small but surprising twist. A relatively new product called Sugru, a colorful, moldable glue, makes it easy to repair all kinds of things in a joyful way.
These small surprises can do a lot to break the monotony of everyday routines. A few months ago I realized that though I loved our white dinnerware, I was getting bored with it. But rather than consider buying a new set, I ordered 2 extra pink plates in each size. The pink dishes make the whole stack of plates seem more appealing, and when laid out on the table for a dinner party, they’re like joyful punctuation marks. Similarly, the ‘accent nail’ trend, which involves painting the thumb or ring fingernail in an atypical color like lemon yellow or turquoise, offers a simple way to make a manicure special.
One of my most amusing yet poignant lessons on the value of the unexpected happened a few years ago. Albert and I had begun to consolidate our finances and needed a joint credit card. As I removed the credit card from the envelope, I discovered it was identical to the one I used for my own personal spending. To tell the cards apart, I put a sticker on the face of the new one: a tiny llama. I didn’t think much about it until a few days later when I was paying for groceries. The cashier took the card from me and then burst into a giggle: ‘Is that a llama? How fun!’ Since then, at least half the time I use my ‘llama card’ I’m greeted with a big smile or a laugh. In the brusque, plastic world of finance, a furry llama is about as unexpected as can be. It sounds silly, but the surprised reactions people to have to the llama always jostle me out of my type A, impatient mindset. They slow me down, prompt an exchange of names and pleasantries, and shift what are often impersonal transactions into joyful moments of conversation and connection.”
“Jordan Ferney suggests hiding a mix of small, brightly colored balloons inside a friend’s mailbox, fridge, or car in order to give them a delightful moment of surprise. Another way to surprise a friend is with a mystery vacation or excursion: tell them how long you’ll be going for and what they need to pack, but don’t reveal the destination until you both arrive at the airport. Surprising someone else can be doubly delightful because it often tempts them to return the favor just when you least expect it, creating a joyful circle of surprise.
Hiding things also enables us to do something that seems impossible on the face of it: surprise ourselves. A few years ago, when the first chilly day of fall arrived, I put on a coat I hadn’t worn in 6 months. When I stuck my hand in the pocket, I felt a trio of shells, collected on a winter beach walk the previous year. Since then, I often hide small souvenirs — stones, acorns, ticket stubs — from my adventures in my coat pockets and handbags, knowing that when I find them later they’ll feel like little gifts.”
“‘If you look at one of my pieces, there are usually 2 things present,’ he said. ‘One, it’s kind of related to something you know. If it’s a chair, it’s got 4 legs. He paused, smiling wryly. ‘I don’t do chairs with 18 legs. I do things that in a way are familiar to you, feel comfortable. But then there’s something…,’ and here he made a noise like a car stopping short, and his eyes flashed as he gestured an abrupt left turn with his hand. ‘Something a little weird, something that surprises. We call that an unexpected welcome. It’s a bit of a surprise, but it’s a welcome surprise. It’s a way that we still a sense of lightness in products.’”
“The unexpected welcome is a contradiction, a tension that pulls the mind in opposite directions: between the strange and the familiar. Pure strangeness can be alienating on its own. But weird becomes wonderful when it’s tethered to an element we can recognize. The flamingo delights us because for all its peculiarity, it’s still a bird with 2 swings, a beak, and feathers. Its ‘birdness’ is a reference point by which we can measure its eccentricity. Similarly, we measure things in our surroundings against the yardstick of our own bodies, so giant lamps or miniature cupcakes transform our sense of ourselves.”
“Objects don’t need to be [super] wild. Slight asymmetries, or small adjustments to proportions, like those common in handcrafted objects, can create a gentle quirkiness that makes the surprise aesthetic more accessible for every day.
I soon realized that this simple idea could take us far beyond creating delightful moments in our homes. It could also challenge stereotypes and preconceptions in a joyful way. The contradictions inherent in the unexpected welcome trigger what psychologists call a need for accommodation. Surprises punctuate our worldview, forcing us to reconcile new info with previously-held beliefs. When we’re stressed or anxious, we become less tolerant of ambiguity and risk, which in turn makes us more likely to reject things that are strange, offbeat, or new. But in a state of joy, our mindset becomes more fluid and accepting of differences. Studies have shown that positive emotions decrease an effect called the own-race bias, whereby people tend to recognize faces of their own race more quickly than those of other races. Other studies have shown that positive affect makes people less likely to cling go an initial hypothesis when presented with conflicting evidence. This suggests that joyful surprises might help disrupt harmful stereotypes, increasing the chances that we’ll see differences as delightful, rather than threatening.”
“Traditionally, prosthetics have been designed to mimic the body parts they’re replacing. Matched to skin tone and featuring lifelike details, these devices seek to comfort amputees and those with birth defects not only by restoring functionality but also by creating as natural an appearance as possible. 3D printing of limbs began as a way to address the problems of accessibility in prosthetics, particularly for children. Prosthetic devices are complex and expensive, and children grow so quickly that it has rarely been possible to justify the costing of fitting them. So most children with missing hands or fingers have simply had to do without. But the advent of 3D printing has enabled volunteer designers to create custom-fitted prosthetic hands for children that can be assembled by families like Lego kits, often for less than $50 (compared with thousands for a traditional prosthetic). These prosthetics have radically increased accessibility for children, but they’ve also had an unexpected benefit: they often look more like accessories than prosthetics. Fashioned in bright colors like red, blue, and purple, they feature visible joints and elastic bands that function as tendons to enable grasping. Kids discover that hands can be made fluorescent or glow-in-the-dark. 11-year-old Jordan Reeves, who was born with a left arm that stops just above the elbow, designed a prosthetic arm that shoots glitter. She’s currently working on an interchangeable design that lets a user switch between attachments, swapping out the glitter shooter for a hand or whatever else is desired in the moment.
Rather than aiming to blend in, these new hands call attention to themselves. And in doing so, they disrupt the common perception that a disability is a disadvantage. Some parents report that while their kids used to be teased or bullied, now other kids admire their child’s superhero-like hands. By framing differences in a joyful way, these 3D-printed prosthetics give children a surprising new freedom to be themselves.”
“All children live in a world rich with surprises. Each new thing, no matter how ordinary, inspires a sense of wonder and delight. But novelty naturally declines with age, and our surroundings begin to dull with familiarity. Psychologists call this phenomenon hedonic adaptation. I imagine that it’s much worse in the modern era than when we were nomadic hunter-gatherers, out in nature with all of its dynamism. Our solid, unchanging indoor environments don’t harbor surprises, unless we put them there. The danger of hedonic adaptation is that it sparks a kind of desperate materialism. Hungry for novelty, we often throw out functioning objects that have lost their luster and replace them with shiny new versions. In fact, hedonic adaptation is often known as the hedonic treadmill, because the cycle can repeat endlessly without bringing us any closer to happiness.
The surprise aesthetic can be a tool for cultivating a more emotionally sustainable relationship with our things. When the objects in our life continue to surprise us, we don’t want to trade them for new ones. We rediscover their joy again and again, and we fall a bit more in love each time. By restoring a sense of whimsy and unpredictability to our surroundings, small bursts of surprise also change our relationship to the world as a whole. Surprise destabilizes us a little, just enough to introduce a new idea or a different perspective. It brings back a bit of that childlike freshness. By snapping us out of our habitual thought patterns, a small surprise can reset our joy meters and allow us to see with new eyes.”
Transcendence
“This kind of joy is inscribed within our language. Walking on air. Being on cloud 9. Feeling swept off your feet. We feel uplifted or in high spirits when joyful or in low spirits when sad. Research suggests that these associations are unconscious and automatic. For example, people recognize positive words more quickly when they’re shown at the top of a computer screen, and negative words more quickly when they appear at the bottom. In a 1920s study, when people were shown pictures of different kinds of lines and asked to choose one that looked ‘merry’ or ‘cheerful,’ they overwhelmingly chose lines that sloped upward, while downward-sloping lines were chosen as sad. Upward movements also seem to correlate to joy, as evidenced by a recent study in which researchers asked people to recall memories while moving marbles between 2 trays. The people who moved the marbles upward, from a low tray to a high one, recalled more positive memories than the people who moved the marbles down.”
“For most of recorded history, flight was a capability reserved for deities and angels. By the second century BC the Chinese had invented the kite, which they used to carry fishing lines away from the shore and to signal during battles. Throughout the Middle Ages, people experimented with gliders, makeshift wings, rockets, and propeller toys. But it wasn’t until the invention of the hot-air balloon in 1783 that people were above to soar above the earth untethered. The first flights were scenes of almost indescribable joy and wonder. At one of the early balloon trials in Paris, thousands gathered along the Champs de Mars to catch a glimpse of the launch.”
“It made sense to me that the word ‘elation,’ which describes an intense feeling of joy, comes from the Latin elatus, meaning ‘raised up’ or ‘elevated.’
Over the years, people have crafted ingenious structures to access the elation of elevation. Zip lines let us careen among cliffs and trees, funiculars ascend steep inclines, and revolving restaurants spin slowly to reveal panoramic views. The Ferris wheel debuted in Chicago in 1893 at the Columbian Exposition, with the hope that it would offer a whimsical answer to the Eiffel Tower.”
“We descend from tree dwellers. Long before hominids walked upright through the grasses of the savanna, our primate ancestors swung from the forest canopy, and still do. All great apes build sleeping platforms high in the trees, except for the male gorilla, which grows too big and heavy to do so. A few cultures, mostly in tropical areas of South Asia, still use tree houses as their primary dwellings because they keep inhabitants safe from flooding, snakes, and other dangers. In the trees we feel held by nature, secure and hidden from view.
Yet at the same time, the treehouse also offers a certain wild freedom. For a child, the treehouse is often the first place of independence, a hideaway out of the range of the parental gaze, where kids make the rules and determine who comes in and out. The treehouse sits apart from the civilized world in 2 ways. First, it lies out in the woods, away from houses and towns and cars and buildings. And second, it stand up in the trees, above the swirl of everyday life. ‘You look out the window and there’s a chickadee,’ said Nelson. ‘You’re in the birds’ area. And that to me was always magical and inspiring.’ He led the way into one of his treehouses, a 2-story beauty with a wooden sign reading TRILLIUM outside it. 2 clear walls of paned windows wrapped around the facade, and a staircase spiraled around the big western cedar that held it. The house jostled slightly as we moved through it. Nelson smiled, ‘You really do feel it when a good gust comes through,’ he said. ‘It’s like being on a boat.’ That swaying movement made me feel like I’d become part of the forest and increased my sense of distance from the world on the ground.
We tend to assume that the treehouse is a space for children, but, in fact, treehouses have a long history of being used by adults as places for relaxation and recreation. One of the first references to a treehouse comes from Pliny the Elder in the first century AD, who described one built in a plane tree for Roman emperor Caligula. Treehouses were also popular in the Renaissance (the Medici family had several) and the Romantic period in France and England. In the 1850s, a band of enterprising restauranteurs inspired by Robinson Crusoe created a cluster of treehouse restaurants and bars just south of Paris. High in the branches of chestnut trees were gazebo-like dining rooms laced with rambling rose, where patrons ate lunch and drank champagne hoisted up in baskets on pulleys. At the phenomenon’s peak, there were 10 different restaurants and 200+ huts among the trees. Nelson has found that adults are rediscovering the joy of treehouses, primarily as spaces to pursue their hobbies and passions. He and his crew have built a recording studio, an art studio, a spa with a hot tub and sauna, and a Zen meditation retreat, all high up in the trees.”
“Research has found that gaining elevation can lead us to focus more on the big picture and less on the details of a situation. For example, when told someone is painting a room, people who’d just walked down a flight of stairs were more likely to think about the specific actions involved (‘applying brushstrokes’), while people who’d just walked up the stairs were more likely to think about the broader purpose behind the actions (‘making the room look fresh’). This ability to think abstractly has been shown to promote creative thinking and help people adhere to their values when making complex decisions and resist short-term temptations that might sabotage long-term goals.”
“What if the impending arrival of a train were always preceded by bubbles, rather than a staticky announcement through a loudspeaker? A few years ago, I heard from a friend whose father was in charge of the entertainment for the Portland Marathon; he had hired a team of bubble blowers to stand at a bend in the course. I’m sure many runners’ heavy legs lightened when they rounded the turn and saw the sky filled with bubbles.”
“This intense state can affect us in profound ways. In a study by researcher Yang Bai, tourists at Fisherman’s Wharf in SF and Yosemite were asked to draw pictures of themselves. When the researchers compared the resulting drawings, they found that people drew themselves as much smaller when immersed in the grandeur of Yosemite than in the hubbub of SF. This study offers a striking illustration of the experience many people have in moments of awe: the feeling of being ‘small or insigificant.’ Keltner calls this phenomenon the small self, and while it may sound unpleasant, in fact for most people it comes with a euphoric feeling of resonance and oneness with other beings. People in this state often say that they feel the presence of a higher power and that day-to-day concerns recede from their attention.”
“While the proportions of most homes don’t lend themselves to awe, exactly, we can still create spaces that feel more uplifting by highlighting the vertical dimensions of the space. If you’re lucky enough to have high ceilings, you can draw attention to them by adding decorative moldings, wood beams, or painted details. Eye-catching light fixtures or sculptures can also draw the eye upward, though take care to keep overheard elements light; heavy details can create a looming feeling that’s the opposite of transcendence. If your ceilings are on the lower side, you can make them feel loftier by choosing low-slung furniture, especially big pieces like sofas, beds, and dressers. The conventional wisdom that light-colored ceilings feel higher has been borne out by research; painting the walls a light color can increase the effect.Tall plants, vertical stripes, built-in bookshelves, and long curtains hung near the ceiling can also accentuate the height of a room.”
“Skylights and clerestories, the term for windows placed above sky level, offer a way to bring a similar delight into our own spaces. This kind of joy is now available even for apartment dwellers. An Italian company called CoeLux has created a realistic (yet pricey) faux skylight that uses nanotech to create the feeling of sunlight entering a room from above.
As with the energy aesthetic, color influences light and vice versa. The light walls and ceilings that make a room seem taller are also naturally more reflective, mimicking the diaphanous quality of light at elevation. Gradient washes (also called ombre) in pale colors evoke the way the sky’s hue naturally fades toward the horizon. Blue, as the color of the sky, is especially conducive to creating a transcendent feeling.”
Magic
“We don’t lose our sense of enchantment [when we grow up]. Uncanny coincidences, like running into a friend on the streets of a foreign city, or lucky breaks, like when the bus pulls up just as you get to the stop, make life feel somehow charmed. A mathematician would explain these events through probability, but most of us can’t help but find greater significance in them.”
“I came across a survey conducted in Iceland in 2007 that revealed that 58% of that country’s population believed in the possible existence of elves. (A further 21% said it was unlikely but refused to rule it out.)”
“Though only 5% of Icelanders claim to have seen elves outright, and few discuss it openly, the tacit acknowledgement of these otherworldly creatures exerts a quiet by pervasive influence on Icelandic culture. More than a few large-scale construction projects have been cancelled or diverted due to concerns about the destruction of elf habitats. One such road in the north of Iceland curves around a large landmass, because, as locals say, the bulldozer mysteriously broke on the first day of work and didn’t function again until an altered plan was agreed upon with reps from the elf community. (Developers sometimes hire interpreters for this purpose, who converse with the local elf hidden people and negotiate changes to a proposed design or the moving of elf settlements that might be disrupted by new roads or buildings.) On another street, a group of builders has its own house number, indicating that the elves who inhabit the terrain are as much a part of society as anyone else.
Iceland’s belief in alfar and huldufolk seems a puzzling quirk for a highly educated country where one out of every ten people is a published author. But after a few days immersed in Iceland’s strange and wild terrain, the need for magical explanations begins to seem rational. Steam wafts from snow-covered fields. Milky salt pools appear in the middle of nowhere, and double rainbows span vast waterfalls that run white with force. One day I found myself stripping down to a bathing suit to soak in a tiny geothermal lagoon in the middle of a frozen lava field, endless whiteness in every direction. The sun barely rose above the horizon, and when it set the whole sky glowed pink like cotton candy.”
“In a way, magic acts as a counterpart to the energy aesthetic, complementing its focus on the visible manifestations of energy (namely, vibrant color and bright light) by surfacing all the other kinds of energies around us: the ones we rarely see and don’t quite understand. Air, for example, often appears to us as empty, but place a wind sock or a pinwheel in a garden, and it reveals that the air isn’t empty at all but has a mass and movement all its own. A mobile can do the same thing. Inside the new Sandy Hook school is set of mobiles created by artist Tim Prentice. ‘They’re made of little pieces of aluminum like leaves in a tree,’ said architect Barry Svigals, ‘and when the AC comes on they move ever so slightly.’ They reflect light down onto the floor. It’s hard to describe the mystery and wonder of those mobiles as they play with the air currents.’ Wind chimes and bells also come alive on the breeze to magical effect. I’ve noticed that a few companies sell wind chimes as sympathy gifts for people who’ve lost loved ones. The dance between the chimes and the invisible winds reminds the bereaved that a deceased loved one is still present in spirit, if not in body.
Another favorite magical object of mine is the prism, which reveals the spectrum of colors hidden in ordinary sunlight. I keep one on my desk and have seen people hang faceted prisms called suncatchers in their windows. At certain times of day when sunlight hits the prism, it scatters tiny rainbows across the room. You can buy prisms online from scientific supply stores or use old chandelier crystals, which can often be found in antique shops for a dollar or 2. Ridged or etched glassware can have a similar effect, creating rainbows from a glass of water. Some architects have even used prismatic glass to create windows or skylights that bathe a space in rainbow reflections.”
“Winter has often been accused of being the least joyful season. But though it’s not as liberating or vibrant as other seasons, it’s certainly the most magical. As writer J. Priestley has observed, ‘The first fall of snow is not only an event, but it’s a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of world and wake up to find yourself in another quite different, and if this isn’t enchantment, then where is it to be found?’”
“Descartes counted the feeling of wonder among his 6 basic passions, defining it as an emotion ‘that brings [the soul] to focus on things that strike it as unusual and extraordinary.’ Wonder overlaps with owe and both emotions elicit a similar wide-eyed, jaw-dropped expression. But unlike awe, which has both positive and negative strains, wonder is nearly always used to describe a joyous feeling. It often arises when we find ourselves in new surroundings, which helps explain why travel can be so magical and why childhood prompts such a blurring between magic and real life. Everything is new for children, and everything is wondrous. [The magician] doesn’t perform for children under age 6 because the tricks often fall fat. ‘Young children are as enthralled by garage-door openers as they are by levitation,’ he said. ‘It’s kind of beautiful, when you think about it. Everything is magical to a kid.’”
“Dutch company Crealev has developed a magnetic tech that makes household objects levitate. Designer Richard Clarkson, a former student of mine, worked with his tech to create a cloud-shaped speaker that floats on a mirrored base like an object out of a surrealist painting.
Science fiction write Arthur Clarke’s well-known third law states, ‘Any sufficiently advanced tech is indistinguishable from magic,’ which explains the confusion that can occur when people encounter a new innovation for the first time. While the 18th-century Parisians who watched one of the first hot-air-balloon launches were elated by the spectacle, the country people who witnessed the balloon descending in a field a few miles away thought it was the work of demons and attacked it with knives and pitchforks. (After this incident, aeronauts supposedly took to carrying bottles of champagne with them as peace offerings for suspicious farmers.)
But while tech can create a sense of magic, it can also be a moving target. Some technologies are delightful decades after their first appearance (think of Polaroids), while others became a banal part of the background (like WiFi or GPS). An innovation greeted with joy and wonder often seems humdrum once it’s reached saturation in the world around us and eventually becomes quaint.
I think I [now] have a better understanding of why this happens. The tech industry can be preoccupied with seamlessness: making all the points of friction in an experience disappear. This certainly creates a feeling of convenience, but in the process it makes us blase about what we’re witnessing. A state-of-the-art elevator that shoots to the top of an office building in a few seconds is technically remarkable, but it’s a dull ride. On the other hand, a glass elevator that travels all of 3 stories can be downright enchanting; by letting us see the changing view as we rise, it reminds us that being lofted into the air at the push of a button is its own kind of magic. We’re living at a moment when tech is redefining our world at an unprecedented rate, creating more opportunities to be dazzled but with a greater risk of fatigue. Our best defense is to maintain a juxtaposition between the high tech and the mundane. Tech is most magical when it reminds us of the boundaries of our existence, even as it shatters them.”
“While magnetic levitation tech is striking, we can create a similar illusion with plain old fishing line. Visual merchandisers, designers who create the eye-catching displays in store windows, often use this trick to suspend objects so that from a distance they appear to be floating in midair. Similarly, mirrors can be used to transform ordinary spaces into magical ones. One of my favorite Eliasson installations is simply a room with a gigantic circular mirror attached to the ceiling. I went with my friend and her mom and the three of us lay down beneath it. After a minute or so we felt our sense of space invert. Were we on the floor looking up at the ceiling, or on the ceiling looking down on the floor? The sensation switched back and forth multiple times, and when we stood up, I almost felt like Spiderman, walking sticky footed in an upside-down world. Mirrors invert space, making it seem as though reality has been flipped or folded. The magic of mirrors is particularly evident in small spaces. A large, floor-length mirror can expand a space or even create the perception of an extra room. A mirror placed behind a light source makes the light appear to glimmer. Positioning a pair of mirrors so that they face each other creates a kind of endless reflection known as an infinity mirror.
One of the simplest ways to create magic is with optical illusions, which use repeating liens, shapes, or curves to create an impression of depth or movement. The desire to explore the strange wizardry of illusions spawned an artistic movement called op art, which flourished in the 60s. For a dramatic statement, op art wallpapers can create a space with walls that seem to vibrate; geometric tiles can be used in an op art-style floor. Posters and rugs can lend this effect on a smaller scale. Optical illusions are becoming an increasingly common form of street art. Recently a mother-daughter pair of Indian artists used the technique to create crosswalks that look 3D to drivers, creating the illusion that pedestrians are walking on a series of floating islands in the middle of the room.
Another optical phenomenon with ancient roots and modern appeal is iridescence, a fleeting play of colors that can be found on the surface of an oily puddle, the wings of a butterfly, and the inside of a mussel shell. Iridescent materials have long been considered magical, likely because of the way that the colors shift and transform. The Maya used paints mixed with mica, a pearlescent material, to paint one of their temples so that it glimmered in the sun. Some ancient Egyptians wore eye shadows made of sparkling pigments in honor of Horus, the god of the sky. As it turns out, the makeup had a strange side effect: the ground minerals contained ions that stimulated the skin’s production of nitric oxide, which in turn boosted the immune system’s response to bacteria. Researchers speculate that this may have protected the wearers from infections they could’ve contracted from river water during the Nile’s annual flooding. The tradition of ‘magical makeup’ continues in the many online tutorials for unicorn- and mermaid-inspired looks, which use iridescent pigments to create a lustrous glow.
Aside from cosmetics, iridescence is more often associated with children’s products, such as fairy-princess dresses and sticker books, than with products for adults. But this luminous effect also has a sophisticated side. Since the 7th century, artisans have used contrasting warp and weft threads to weave color-changing fabrics that seem to shimmer, even though they are made of ordinary wool or cotton. These fabrics often make an appearance in hotel interiors or red-carpet gowns. Many crystals have iridescent effects, which may explain why we often see them as imbued with magical powers. One of the oldest iridescent materials is called dichroic glass, which consists of glass mixed or coated with a thin film of metal. The Romans used it in the 4th century, and NASA further developed it for the space shuttle. Now it’s used by Eliasson in his kaleidoscopes and by designers to make light fixtures, coffee tables, and jewelry with an opalescent sheen.
Whether it’s the illusory movements of an op art canvas or the colors of a peacock feather, magical elements have an elusive quality that feels out of our control. The inherent ambiguity of magic draws us into a liminal space between emotions, one that can be delightful or eerie depending on the situation. Imagine you’re standing in a field, alone and far from shelter. An enormous black cloud-like apparition hovers on the horizon. How do you feel? Now imagine yourself in the same field, but replace the cloud with a rainbow-colored ring in the sky. How do you feel now? Both events are strange and mysterious, yet one inspires fear, the other wonder. Tempering magic with other aesthetics keeps it reliably on the joyous side of the line. When playing with iridescence and illusions, use elements of the energy aesthetic: keep tones light and bright. When working with mirrors, incorporate elements of harmony and play. Distortions, like the ones found in funhouse mirrors, quickly become creepy. Symmetry makes reflections feel balanced, while round edges keep them from becoming jagged or sharp.”
“Magic can be captivating, sparkling, and sublime. But what makes it so compelling is that it ruptures the membrane between possible and impossible, igniting our curiosity about the world we live in. ‘Wonder’ is a marvelous word to describe our response to magic because it’s both a noun and a verb. When we feel wonder (noun), it prompts us to wonder (verb) and then to go in search of an answer. It pulls us forward in learning and exploration.”
“Nikola Tesla, whose work with induction motors led to the system of alternating current that powers our houses and buildings, had his curiosity about electricity piqued by a magical incident in his childhood. During a cold, dry spell, he found that as he stroked the family cat, its back turned into ‘a sheet of light’ and began to spark. The sight was so alarming that his mother insisted he stop playing with the cat in case it caught fire. Tesla said this brief experience was so striking that it continued to fuel his interest in the study of electricity 80 years later.
In the cult of productivity and efficiency that rules our waking hours, magic seems like a luxury, much like daydreaming or play. But far from being a diversion, it’s often a catalyst for discovery. The joy we find in magic stems from a deeper impulse toward the expansion of the mind and the improvement of the human condition. At the root of our love of rainbows, comets, and fireflies is a small reservoir of belief that the world is bigger and more amazing than we ever dreamed it could be. If we’re to be creative and inspired, then giving ourselves permission to feed this reservoir is vital. As writer Eden Phillpotts wrote, ‘The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.’ Wonders never cease, as long as we’re willing to look for them.”
Celebration
“Whether in a crowd of hundreds at a hotel ballroom or with a small cluster of family members at a picnic in the park, joy’s highest highs draw us into communal experience. We pause our daily activities to toast and dance, feast and frolic. We set aside individual preferences, wishes, and anxieties to immerse ourselves in a tide of collective joy.
Why do we do this? From an evolutionary perspective, celebration seems quite frivolous. All that feasting and frolicking expends valuable resources and energy, while at the same time taking us away from productive endeavors. Yet all cultures celebrate, and so do some species of animals. When elephants are reunited after being separated, they stamp around excitedly, urinating, clicking tusks, flapping ears, and entwining trunks. They spin around each other and fill the air with an ecstatic din of trumpets, rumbles, and roars. Wolves are also known for their noisy reactions. They howl exuberantly when the pack comes together after splitting up for a hunt, with harmonic choruses that can last for 2 minutes or longer. The most celebratory of all animals may be our closest relatives, chimps. Primatologist Frans de Waa describes a typical chimp celebration, marking the delivery of bundles of fresh blackberry, beech, and sweet-gum branches to their enclosure. When the chimps spot the caretaker carrying the food, they break into loud hooting that draws in every animal in the vicinity. This is followed by a wild rush of kissing and embracing and a 100-fold increase in friendly body contact among the animals. Afterward, they sit down together to enjoy their bounty. The rigid hierarchies that define chimp social life temporarily ease, and every animal participates in the feast.
That our penchant for festivity is shared by these highly intelligent species raises an intriguing possibility. Perhaps celebration isn’t just a pleasurable indulgence but instead serves some deeper purpose in life. What makes celebration unique is that it’s a distinctly social form of joy. While we do sometimes celebrate alone, with a happy dance or a glass of champagne, more often celebration is something we do with others. At its best, celebration cultivates an atmosphere of inclusive delight. The celebrants brim with euphoric energy, casting a halo over all who are present and connecting them to the larger outpouring of jubilation. The result is a state of belonging and attunement, where for a few moments every individual is united in the same effervescent joy.
This emotional resonance brings us together, strengthening a community and enhancing the bonds within it. Research shows that celebrating positive events with others increases our feeling that they’ll be there for us if we encounter tough times in the future.”
“If you don’t have a physical way to make a space feel more intimate, Rockwell says it’s possible to achieve this transformation with light. ‘Lighting defines the boundary of your world,’ he said. As we’ve seen with the energy aesthetic, light draws people in, so creating a strong contrast between light and dark can create an artificial perimeter that holds the party together. You can do this with pendant lights hung low over a dining table, for example, or string lights that delineate the boundaries of an outdoor celebration.
Just as the space can promote a feeling of unity, so can attire. Sports fans wear jerseys and paint their faces in team colors. Grads wear caps and gowns. Bridal parties wear matching dresses and ties, bouquets and boutonnieres. Even an ordinary gathering of friends can be made into a festive occasion simply by adding a theme. When everyone’s standing around in 80s clothing or ugly Christmas sweaters, there’s a sense of visual harmony that makes people instantly feel a part of something larger than themselves. As the crowd adopts a shared identity, individuals begin to treat one another differently. Studies have shown that when we believe we’re among others who share a group affiliation, we’re more comfortable with less personal space, and we exhibit greater trust. We behave less like strangers and more like members of a tribe.”
“Just listening to music activates the motion centers of the brain, even when our bodies are still, which is why we often find ourselves snapping or tapping along to a beat without even realizing we’re doing so. When infused into a social situation, music produces even-more-mysterious effects. In a study sponsored by Apple and Sonos (admittedly companies that have an interest in promoting music consumption), footage from video cameras placed in homes revealed that household members sat 12% closer to one another when music was playing in a room. And when neuroscientists monitored guitarists playing a short melody together, they found that patterns in the guitarists’ brain activity became synchronized. Similarly, studies of choir singers have shown that singing aligns performers’ heart rate. Music seems to create a sense of unity on a physiological level.
Scientists call this phenomenon synchrony and have found that it can elicit some surprising behaviors. In studies where people sang or moved in a coordinated way with others, researchers found that subjects were significantly more likely to help out a partner with their workload or sacrifice their own gain for the benefit of the group. And when participants rocked in chairs at the same tempo, they performed better on a cooperative task than those who rocked at different rhythms. Synchrony shifts our focus away from our own needs toward the needs of the group. In large social gatherings, this can give rise to a euphoric feeling of oneness — dubbed ‘collective effervescence’ — which elicits a blissful, selfless absorption within a community. Through the joy of belting out a favorite tune or breaking it down on the dancefloor, we become more generous and attuned to the needs of those around us.
This fact goes a long way toward explaining why music and dance are such essential and endearing aspects of our celebrations. According to William McNeill, the pleasure of ‘keeping together in time’ with others played a critical role in enabling humans to form large, cooperative societies — a role that was perhaps even more important than language. Words allowed our ancestors to communicate their needs and agree on shared rules and goals. But when it came to building emotional rapport and motivating people to prioritize the needs of the group over personal desires, language was woefully inadequate. Song and dance instilled a sense of community on a visceral level. By being united in the same rhythm, people didn’t just think of themselves as part of a group; they saw, heard, and felt a harmony that stretched beyond the boundaries of their own bodies.
Sound waves and dance steps didn’t leave fossils, so it’s hard to know exactly when and how our ancestors first began to come together in this way. But anecdotal evidence suggests that festive ceremonies featuring singing and dancing were taking place well before the advent of writing, perhaps as long as 25,000 years ago. Research by Ieger Reznikoff suggests that many cave drawings from the Upper Paleolithic were used as backdrops for ritual celebrations. Reznikoff was humming one day while touring a prehistoric site and noticed that the spots with the highest concentrations of paintings produced resonant echoes not unlike those of a Romanesque chapel. By systematically measuring the number and duration of echoes at different places in caves across France and the Ural Mountains, he confirmed that the most decorated locations also produced the most significant echoes, indicating they may have been scenes of primitive rites, chosen to amplify the group’s songs and chants.”
“Why did depictions of dance suddenly become so popular in those early days of civilization? It just so happens that the Neolithic dance craze coincided with one of the most significant transitions in the history of human life: from living in small bands of hunter-gatherers to large agrarian communities. No longer limited by what they could carry, our ancestors began to amass property, and this gave rise to social and economic stratification. By settling down, societies gained wealth and security, but along with those benefits came a host of destabilizing forces — inequality, jealousy, isolation, distrust — that hunter-gatherers had largely managed to avoid. At this profound inflection point in the evolution of human civilization, Garfinkel suggests, dancing may have been a joyful kind of glue that kept these new societies intact.
To this day, the act of dancing or making music together has the power to connect us to others. You can see this at weddings, where 2 disparate groups of friends and relatives come together as one on the dancefloor. You can see it at festivals, as I did that night when I danced with strangers on the streets of Paris. It even happens at protests, where people chant and sing in unison.”
“The tube man is only about 20, but to understand its genesis we have to go much further back, to the late Middle Ages, when Catholic authorities were attempting to quell what they considered to be an excess of festivity in local churches. Early Christian services had been lively affairs. Dancing was often on the agenda, and even priests participated in the revelry. Early medieval festivals took place inside churches, which didn’t have pews, leaving plenty of space for dancing and making merry. Church leaders had tolerated these behaviors more or less throughout the medieval period, but in the 12th and 13th centuries, they decided to try to curb the rowdy behavior and impose a more sedate form of worship. But they knew they couldn’t get rid of celebration entirely. Instead, they designated certain days as feast days and allowed people to revel as much as they wanted to — not in the church, but in the streets. Freed from the oversight of the clergy, for a few days each year people were able to escape the strict rules and hierarchies that governed feudal life, and an atmosphere of unbridled hedonism prevailed.”
“With wings and feathers, fans and ruffles, Minshall’s designs trace radiating liens out from the body like rays emanating from a star.
Radiating shapes like this have long been a part of celebratory attire across cultures. The traditional festive costume of the Waghi people of Papua New Guinea includes an enormous sunlike headpiece made of feathers from 4 different birds of paradise. In Burkina Faso, the Bobo people wear funeral masks made of long, twisted fibers in bright colors, such as red or purple, that hang the full length of the body. When animated by dance, the fibers create a spectacular, wild spinning motion aimed at driving away ill-tempered spirits. A contemporary example can be found in pom-poms. These flared adornments catch the eye, drawing the observer’s gaze out to the edges of the body to maximize the impact of the spirited cheers. By magnifying the intrinsic gestures of celebration, these costumes and accessories make the joy of the revelers more visible and contagious.
Like the pop of a champagne cork, bursting shapes suggest the release of energy under pressure, which mirrors the sudden outpouring of joy that happens during a celebration. So it’s not surprising that we often find bursting elements used to create a celebratory atmosphere. Chief among these are fireworks, which historians believe have been used since 200 BC in China. The first firecrackers were simply pieces of bamboo tossed into a fire. As the natural air pockets in the bamboo expanded, they gave off a loud pop that people believed could ward off evil spirits. Chinese alchemists added gunpowder, and Italian craftsmen in the 1830s added color, giving us the dazzling flashes and bangs we have now. The handfuls of rice we use to shower a newly married couple or the confetti we throw up in the air on New Year’s Eve are simpler ways of achieving the same effect. Some flowers, such as allium and Queen Anne’s lace, have joyful bursting shapes, as do pom-poms and tassels, which can bring a celebratory feeling to both party decorations and everyday interiors.
The expansive quality of the celebration aesthetic reflects the fact that in the throes of revelry we find not only communion but also release: a sense that was joy bursts out of us, it shatters our boundaries and brings our true self into the open. Carnival provides an open space in which the structures of daily life are eased, allowing latent emotions that normally must be kept under wraps to emerge. Like the bursting of a firecracker, this can be a bit volatile. Still, I don’t think we realize how necessary the visceral release of a celebration like Carnival is to our well-being. Without it, it’s easy to convince ourselves that the responsible, rational, workaday persona we wear most of the time is the sum total of who we are. The regular drumbeat of celebration in primitive life served not only to connect people to one another but also to give them access to a more effusive and instinctual side of themselves.”
“In this light, Carnival artists like Mishall play an important role in a culture, framing up a space for this ecstatic release of energy. Their work manifests the emotion of the occasion in a tangible way, facilitating a kind of communal catharsis. Perhaps this is why, in the mid-90s, Minshall’s work caught the eye of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics planners. If anyone could figure out how to create a joyous celebration for millions of people worldwide, it would be Minshall, and he was tapped to be the artistic director of the opening ceremonies. He envisioned a set of dynamic sculptures larger than anything he’d ever created. They would be like his super-puppets, but instead of being operated by dancing men and women, they’d be powered by air. To bring them to life, Marshall turned to artist Doron Gazit, who used a fan-based mechanism to create the dancing figures. The resulting sculptures, which Minshall called Tall Boys, stood 60 feet tall and danced ecstatically, their bodies swaying and rolling like the Trinidadian dancers on the streets of Carnival.
The opening ceremonies were a success and afterward Minshall went back to Trinidad and continued to dream up ever-grander Carnival performances. Meanwhile, Gazit decided to protest the tech for the inflatable sculptures, licensing it out for halftime shows and corporate events. Copycats sprang up, and soon there were inflatable tube men gyrating in the parking lots of strip malls, living outside electronics stores, and doing the samba next to farm stands, where they often do double duty as scarecrows.
They may be tacky, but in their tireless dance, they distill the heady exuberance of Carnival and bring it into the most unlikely settings. As they repeat the expansive gestures of celebration again and again, they offer a whimsical reminder that joy can burst out at any time.”
“Until the advent of gas-lit streetlamps in the early 19th century, most cities were completely dark after sunset. Only on special occasions like the emperor’s birthday in China or on holy days in Europe, would medieval people have seen such light.”
“The pleasure of fireworks is fleeting, but we can create a more durable version of this delight with fixtures that capture the bursting quality of light in static form. For example, the chandeliers at the Met Opera House in NY feature starbursts of glittering crystals that resemble galaxies seen from a distance. The ‘sputniks,’ as they’re affectionately known, were inspired in part by a book about the Big Bang. I think these fixtures help explain why it always feels so exciting to go to a performance at the Met, even if you’re not much of an opera buff. Smaller versions of these starburst light fixtures can create a festive feeling in the home. For a more 70s-style sparkle, a mirrored disco ball can scatter light in a festive way.
Reflective materials of all kinds can create sparkle: metallic garlands and ribbon, tinsel and sequins, rhinestones and lame, and, of course, glitter. ‘Glitter celebrates,’ late actor Carrie Fisher once said. ‘It’s happy. It makes you look like you’re up for a good time.’ An outspoken advocate for mental health, Fisher was known to wear glitter particularly when she was feeling down, as a way of lifting her spirits. When she signed autographs, she’d occasionally throw a pinch of it at her fans. I can attest to glitter’s power to create a celebratory feeling. I recently bought a pair of shoes covered in gold glitter. Although I originally intended them for special occasions, I’ve started wearing them on errands to make ordinary days more festive. I’ve found that people look at the shoes and smile as if they assume I’m celebrating something. Which, in turn, makes me feel like I am.”
“Jihan Zencirli never expected anything to come from the balloons. The first one was just a birthday gift for her best friend. She ordered a giant balloon from an Etsy shop and fashioned a large, colorful tassel from scraps of fabric and ribbons she’d saved. She had the balloon filled with helium, attached the tassel, and marched her creation down the street to her friend’s party. Measuring 3 ft. in diameter, the balloon floated above her like a festive moon.
‘I got there on the early side, about 6:30,’ she recalled,’ and the front of the restaurant was full of older diners and families.’ She laughed as she remembered the bemused faces, the necks craning to get a better look, the smiles and the stares. People were even more amazed when she turned and walked into the restaurant. Inside the space, the large balloon became not a moon but a sun, a focal point around which the activity revolved. She tied it to her friend’s chair. ‘All night, people stopped by and wanted to talk to her and ask her about her balloon,’ she said. ‘And it became a part of our evening.’ The reaction to the balloon made an indelible impression on Zenirli. ‘It’s the first time I experienced what it was like to have something that draws in so much attention,’ she said. ‘And I could see people looking at my friend, and at this thing, and it was bringing them so much joy.’
After that, Zencirli began carrying balloons on a regular basis. She drove a VW Beetle that had a trunk perfectly sized to hold a single giant balloon, and every day she’d inflate one and take it with her. ‘I became this ‘balloon girl,’ and people in my neighborhood would recognize me,’ she said. One day a woman who’d seen Zencirli with a balloon at a bar tracked her down on the street and begged her to bring her signature balloons to a party she was throwing, handing a fistful of cash through her SUV window. It was Zencirli’s first commission.
Overwhelmed, she rounded up a caravan of 7 friends to help her bring all the balloons to the event. It turned out to be a success, and she soon attracted other clients. But in those early days, she still had a full-time job, and making the balloons was a side project. She set up a bare-bones site, Geronimo Balloons, with a PayPal link. There weren’t even any photos on it. Then a prominent LA blogger wrote a post about the giant balloons, and the next day Zencirli woke up with $30k worth of orders to fill. ‘Of balloons!’ she said, still incredulous. She hadn’t even thought to charge people sales tax.
From there, well, Geronimo Balloons started to blow up. Zencirli refined the design, crafting the tassels out of tissue-paper fringe, sometimes adding sparkly gold or silver elements. The balloons became a favorite of event planners and magazine editors and were often spotted floating over the heads of glowing moms-to-be at baby showers or replacing flowers along the aisles at weddings. The price point was high, $50-$75 per balloon, but each was so enormous and festive that just one could transform a room.”
I had watched the proliferation of Geronimo Balloons with interest, and a bit of curiosity. A helium balloon is inherently joyful — equal parts playful and transcendent — but making the balloon bigger and adding a flurry of ribbons takes its joy to another level. I began to notice that oversize objects often make an appearance in celebratory contexts. At carnivals, when people win big at Skee-Ball or the ring toss, they receive a giant stuffed animal, often bigger than the person who won it. And in those ceremonies for lotto winners that are sometimes shown on local TV, there is always a giant check to represent the jackpot. A mangum of champagne is more festive than 2 standard bottles, a stretch limo more celebratory than 2 regular cars. At Christmas, we bring an entire, full-sized tree into our homes — the bigger, the better. What is it about making something bigger that makes it festive?
Large-scale elements signal that something different and important is happening in the life of a community. Giant balloons, numbers (for a birthday party), hearts (for V-Day), baby blocks (for a shower), and other big things stand out as different from everyday decor. Oversize food items can also play this role and have the advantage of lending themselves well to sharing. As Julia Child famously said, ‘A party without cake is just a meeting.’ A pig roast, a punch bowl, and a champagne or chocolate fountain are other examples of food or drink scaled up to create a focal point for a celebration. The same principle can also apply to dress, particularly for women. Ladies attending the Royal Ascot horse race in London wear enormous hats decorated with feathers and bows. Some men wear top hats as well. If horse races aren’t on the agenda, a statement necklace, flower crown, or cocktail ring are other oversize festive touches.
Put simply, big things express big joy. They function as a nucleus for the festivities, a beacon that draws people in.”
Renewal
“The opening of the cherry blossoms is an occasion almost of madness in Japan. In the brief season of their bloom, a culture known for its quiet reserve opens up and becomes giddy. People throw themselves into the evanescent joy of the season, taking time off from work to gather for hanami, the traditional blossom-watching picnics that date back to the 8th century. In Ueno Park, the site of 1,000+ cherry trees, men in suits and women in dresses lay sprawled out on blue and green plastic tarps, gazing up into the canopy. Friends gathered in clusters, laughing and talking, taking turns snapping photos. Children reached up to grasp the falling petals. One little girl lay on her back and flailed her arms like she was making a snow angel. During cherry blossom season people drop their usual masks, smiling broadly in the parks and the streets.”
“Our efforts to prolong our joy sometimes diminish its intensity, for example, when we choose blooms genetically engineered for hardiness over short-lived varieties bred for scent. But rather than avoid the transient nature of their favorite season, the Japanese lean into it. I was surprised to discover that the vast majority of cherry trees planted in Tokyo and around Japan are just from one species, the Yoshino cherry. By choosing to plant just the one type of tree, the Japanese have created a landscape designed to burst open in one glorious eclat, to herald the arrival of spring not with a steady trickle of different blooms but a single abundant spectacle.”
“With their broadening shapes and unfurling petals, flowers have a dynamic energy that suggests emergence and becoming. We find an implicit understanding of this in the way we use the word ‘blossoming’ to describe someone coming into her own or ‘late bloomers’ to denote a person who’s taken longer than usual to reach his potential. The word ‘flourish’ derives from the same root as ‘flower.’ Flowers signify a kind of uncontainable verve, a life force that can’t help but find its way out.
The connection between flowers and flourishing isn’t just metaphorical. For our foraging ancestors, flowers offered an important piece of info about the landscape: they gave clues to the future locations of edible fruits and seeds, several weeks or months ahead of time. Flowers were like coming attractions for food, and early humans who were smart enough to notice them would’ve been able to plan their return so as to harvest the ripened fruit before birds or other rivals could devour it. Over time, an appreciation of flowers may have provided enough of a survival advantage that it became an intrinsic human attribute, so universal that indifference to flowers is a common sign of depression. In a world where we pick our fruits from the produce aisle rather than the vine, we’ve lost the conscious connection between flowers and food. But our delight in flower bears traces of an anachronistic anticipation, a cue to expect future joy.”
“Originally built for freight trains to reach the factories and warehouses along NY’s west side, the High Line was in operation until 1980. By the 90s, the structure had become so derelict that local residents were lobbying for its demolition. As landscape architect James Corner tells it, ‘Most people had only ever seen the underside of the High Line, and it was just big hulking steel, rusting and dripping and dark and dank. Nobody knew that the topside had this beautiful self-sown carpet of green.’ Whether blown by winds or excreted by passing birds, seeds landed in the rotting woods of the railroad ties and took root. ‘There were vines up there and grasses and perennial flowers and weird shrubs,’ said Corner. ‘It was just magical.’ You couldn’t help but be impressed by nature’s resiliency, in terms of being able to just body forth this amazing playground of life in a bereft landscape.’ Inspired by this self-centered Eden, a foundation formed with the purpose of turning it into an urban park, and architects from around the world were invited to submit ideas for its design. Many designers treated the site as a blank canvas, but for Corner, who was enchanted by the renewal that had already begun, it seemed the right thing to do was as little as possible. Though many subtle changes were made to enable safe access, create a system of planting beds and water collection, and increase the biodiversity of the vegetation, the High Line feels like a space still in the process of revival, a continuation of what nature began for itself.”
“In renewal, we find perhaps the clearest expression of a truth that underlies all of the aesthetics in this book: that the drive toward joy is synonymous with the drive toward life. From that first revelation of the ancestral link between bright color and ripeness to the simplicity of the S curve, this correlation has held true. Joy evolved for the express purpose of helping to steer us toward conditions that would encourage us to flourish. It’s our inner guide to the things that animate, stimulate, and sustain us. Put more simply, joy is what makes life worth living.
And yet for some reason, we’ve decided that it’s superfluous — the icing on the cake, rather than an integral part of the cake itself. We sort our lives neatly into buckets of needs and wants, and even though joy’s origins lie in highlighting what’s essential for our survival, it has come to signify the ultimate luxury, an extra we allow ourselves only if all our needs are met. The problem is that without joy, we may be surviving, but we are not thriving. If we rarely laugh or play, if we never have glimpses of magic or flashes of transcendence or bursts of celebration, then no matter how well fed and comfortable we are, we aren’t truly alive.
Once we accepted the notion that joy is inessential, it became easy for it to slip out of the center of our lives. Work became about endless gains in productivity, rather than the joy of craft or creation. School became a push for achievement, rather than an exploration or an adventure. Systematically, joy was squeezed out of the places where we spend most of our days. And the same thing happened to our physical environment. Buildings presented themselves as canvases for the display of status or ideology or brand identity, rather than spaces for the cultivation of joy. As joy moved to the edges of our world, to playgrounds and beaches, nature preserves and candy stores, the rest of the world was left to languish.
The notion of environmental renewal is now a well-accepted one. While debate exists about just how to repair the damage we’ve done to fragile ecosystems with our sprawling development and ravenous appetite for natural resources, there’s broad consensus that such renewal is necessary for us to survive and flourish on this planet. What we need now is a similar revitalization of the man-made world, a humanistic renewal to parallel the naturalistic one already under way. We need to bring joy back into the heart of our lives. We need to bring our world back to life.
The beauty of renewal is that it has its own momentum, propelled by the relentless ambition of life to endure and propagate. Life multiplies, and so does joy. The infectious quality of joy makes its dispersion as efficient as the most prolific weed. Even the smallest efforts — a painted mural, a knit cozy around a parking meter, a single flower — can be the beginning of an upward spiral that changes a community, a life. To fix the world is a tall order, but to renew it is not nearly so daunting. The lesson of renewal is that from small seeds big things grow. And though I never would’ve suspected it when I started writing this book, it’s not far-fetched to believe that from the seeds of our own joy, a whole world can be reborn.”
