Hasta La Ideas

As the writer of a blog on design and joy, a lot of what I think about on a daily basis has to do with things that delight us in spite of their apparent non-utility. In addition to rainbows, I write about things like kaleidoscopes and swimming pools, confetti and hot air balloons, bioluminescence and optical illusions. By understanding the aesthetic essence of these simple pleasures—color, light, growth, abundance, magic—my goal is to look for more ways to design delight into our world.

It’s not lost on me that this can seem like a frivolous endeavor and from time to time I’ve been asked to answer for the energy I devote to pleasure and whimsy. While I’m waxing prosaic on treehouses or designing “joyful” service gestures, other designers are engaged in tackling weighty issues of clear importance to humankind. Providing sanitation in the developing world, developing systems for healthy eating, creating sanitary products for women in Africa: these “design for the other 90%” projects make a measurable improvement in the quality of millions of people’s lives. Through design, they reduce the spread of disease, enable social change and create thriving new economies that raise entire communities above the poverty line. Their projects highlight the unique contribution of designers and design methods to solving real, thorny systems challenges. By contrast, delight seems like a first-world design problem: something you do only after you have ample food, clean water, safe shelter, clothing, education, healthcare and all the other basics, covered.

But as a design principle, delight is deceptively light. Over the past few years, research has been accumulating to show that positive emotion offers real benefits in terms of physical well-being, social interaction, and professional performance. Through neuroscience, we’re learning that pleasure taps into primal pathways in the brain that were formed to help us grow, develop and prosper. And through psychological studies of people and relationships, we’re discovering that joy inspires attitudes and behaviors that lead to greater health and success. So when I think about delight in the context of design, it’s not just about delight as an end (however appealing that may be), but about delight as a conduit to bigger goals and to better lives.

What follows are four examples of the tangible benefits of designing with joy in mind, a sort of case “in defense” of delight that serves as both support for efforts to integrate positive emotion into design, as well as a design challenge for those inspired to try.

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