Often, I return to Seamus Heaney, in his Crediting Poetry Nobel lecture, where he explores the properties of poetry:
I credit [poetry] immediately because of a line I wrote fairly recently encourage myself (and whoever else might be listening) to “walk on air against your better judgment.” But I credit it ultimately because poetry can make an order as true to the impact of external reality … An order where we can at least grow up to that which we stored up as we grew. An order which satisfies all that is appetitive in the intelligence and prehensile in the affections.
I credit poetry, in other words, both for being itself and for being a help, for making possible a fluid and restorative relationship between the mind’s centre and its circumference, between the child gazing at the word “Stockholm” on the face of the radio dial and the man facing the faces that he meets in Stockholm at this most privileged moment. I credit it because credit is due to it, in our time and in all time, for its truth to life, in every sense of that phrase.
Music seems to have a special power to animate us. There’s something about rhythm that seems to compel one to move with the beat. This is an exclusive human propensity. Children spontaneously move with the beat. No animal does so spontaneously.
[Letters] have a shape and life of their own outside of legibility. This is the birth of typography as a profession, which is akin to the birth of recorded music. Before music could be captured and reproduced, musical performances were heard once by whoever was present, just as typographic works could only be performed once by the scribe and had a limited audience. After recorded music, one performance could be distributed and heard by millions of people. After Gutenberg, one typographer could create letters that made content for millions of people to read.
Over at Lined & Unlined, there’s reference to a 1960s debate that raged over records versus live music, and a famous radio documentary and article by Glenn Gould, “The Prospects of Recording.” Gould relates live concert musicians to the protests of the typesetters’ union:
Automation: a crusade which musicians’ union leaders currently share with typesetters and which they affirm with the fine disdain of featherbedding firemen for the diesel locomotive. In the midst of a proliferation of recorded sound which virtually erases earlier listening patterns, the American Federation of Musicians promotes that challenging motto “LIVE MUSIC IS BEST.”
This all means that a lone designer can draw a letter, put it on her blog and have the world see it instantly. She is part of the massive design and typography explosion, and also part of a long conversation. Every stroke she makes is an evocation of history and a direct ode to Gutenberg taking the hand-inked letters of his time, and turning them into lead soldiers that print and print and print and print, five-hundred and fifty-four years and counting.
Bach is distilled Something Else. He composed against the currents of his day; he swam upstream; he was a reactionary (for example: composing elaborate difficult counterpoint when the musical world was simplifying into homophony). His genius, according to the usual view, is not that of inventor or destroyer, but belongs to that colder virtue of perfection. Separation from Time is part of the Bach myth; against his island of perfection the vicissitudes of music history uselessly and cyclically break their waves. He ushers in no new Style, no Movement, no Ism; he opens the door to no Revolution; and therefore he is “pointless,” historically speaking. He would not “Stick it to the Man;” he is The Man.
On the contrast in Bach’s D major Partitas:
The minor keys in the major movements of the D major Partitas do not seem to oppose the prevailing mood but to fill it out; these momentary sadnesses seem to make the overall joy believable. …. The turn to major arises from the confirmation of minor; sadness is a cause for celebration and vice versa; the happier and sadder moments do not rebut each other, they are no dialectic; even the terms “happy” and “sad” may not be applicable; they each draw on the other, and blur the other, in a chain of logic, inspiration and cause.
Being asked to write regarding something quite specific is always a relief. Just like I’ve always been a better at playing classical music than jazz, at printing rather than cursive, constraints are remarkably welcome, and doubly so when time is tight. Given the intersection of candy, October, and time, Jason’s offer was pretty easy.
Candy is not mathematics. That is sort of the whole point really. It was a pause from school uniforms and black marble notebooks. But the geometry and constraints of the Tootsie Pop were unequivocally appealing to a young mind. Namely: the best stuff is contained on the interior of a structure that one is capable of getting to, but should not get to, in the intuitive sense. One must take the slow route — by licking.
A recent study suggests that contrary to what seems logical, nonsense may provide space for the brain to detect patterns in it would otherwise miss.
Researchers familiar with the new work say it would be premature to incorporate film shorts by David Lynch, say, or compositions by John Cage into school curriculums. For one thing, no one knows whether exposure to the absurd can help people with explicit learning, like memorizing French. For another, studies have found that people in the grip of the uncanny tend to see patterns where none exist — becoming more prone to conspiracy theories, for example. The urge for order satisfies itself, it seems, regardless of the quality of the evidence.
Regardless, short films and music should be part of all school curricula.
In a 1906 edition of Appleton’s Magazine, John Sousa predicts a deterioration of music and musical taste — “impending harm” — because of the introduction of “music reproducing machines.”
Sweeping across the country with the speed of a transient fashion in slang of Panama hats, political war cries or popular novels, comes now the mechanical device to sing for us a song or play for us a piano, in substitute for human skill, intelligence, and soul. …. From the days when the mathematical and mechanical were paramount in music, the struggle has been bitter and incessant for the sway of the emotional and the soulful. And now, in this twentieth century, come these talking and playing machines, and offer again to reduce the expression of music to a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, disks, cylinders, and all manner of revolving things, which are like real art as the marble statue of Eve is like her beautiful, living, breathing daughters.
For technophobes, this is nothing new. Ars Technica covers in terrific detail what fears these emerging technologies bring out in rightsholders. From the introduction of writing itself to radio to television to the digital camera, there’s been handwringing over the destruction to the natural state of things bought by advances in technology.
Tom Waits on how to tell whether your craft has become part of culture:
“What you want is for music to love you back. That’s why you pay your dues. You want to feel like you belong and are part of this symbiosis, metamorphosis, whatever you want to call it. That one day … ” He coughs and regroups. “I used to imagine that making it in music – really making it in music – is if you’re an old man going by a schoolyard and you hear children singing your songs, playing jump-rope, or on the swings. That’s the ultimate. You’re in the culture.”
This is true not just of music, but of everything—design, math, science, art, food. If you’ve ever seen a stranger using the thing you made, the feeling is just the same.
If you’ve been delighted by your iPod, intrigued with your TiVo, or frustrated by your mobile phone, then you have encountered the work of an interaction designer. And an interaction designer, most likely, has crafted the experience we have with many of the products and services we encounter every day. Dan Saffer, a senior interaction designer at Adaptive Path, leads us through an exploration of this emerging discipline. Saffer’s book, Designing for Interaction, is a much-needed primer on the topic, helping us understand the design of interactive systems. (more…)
I’ve just been tagged by the lovely and talented Glenda Sims. And although I’m not sure if my site qualifies as a blog, I will carry the baton nonetheless. (more…)
What is the musical equivalent of mid-century modern design? Spinning on Air host, David Garland, explores the question in today’s “Spinning on Air:”
In the mid-20th Century there were unprecedented modernist influences on the fields of architecture, furniture, graphic, and industrial design. Designers such as Eero Saarinen, Alvin Lustig, and Charles and Ray Eames created chairs, films, and homes that combined innovation, practicality, and beauty.
And:
[He] finds it in the jazz compositions of George Russell, a “Third Stream” piece for electric guitar and strings by Jim Hall, John Cage’s serene “In a Landscape,” Miles Davis’ collaborations with arranger Gil Evans, Elmer Bernstein’s music for the films of Charles and Ray Eames, and more.
My lists are shrinking. Not my to-do lists, unfortunately. Rather, my lists of resolutions. I recently had the opportunity to collect all of my New Year’s resolution lists in one place and noticed a trend. Lists from a decade ago or more had upwards of three dozen items, many of which were objects — books, game consoles, music players. Recent lists, however, were only a few items long: Take more vacations. Spend more time with my family. Do more meaningful work. Exercise more, and more consistently. These were lists of experiences.
As I compare years’ worth of historical resolution lists, this difference is striking. I have a single-track mind for experiences that might make me happy over the course of a year.
The happiness experience
The prevalence of recent studies might indicate there’s a growing trend in our interest in happiness. Chances are good that if you’ve recently opened a news reader, a newspaper, or a certain bestseller, you’ve seen headlines on the state of happiness. How can we be happier? Can we design our own happiness? Is happiness a do-it-yourself pursuit? My lists may be shrinking for an entirely good reason: Investing in experiences over objects amplifies happiness. Money, as it turns out, can’t buy happiness.
As designers we spend a great deal of time considering which brands consumers consider (and even that’s a cultural distinction). Findings show that spending money on experiences over material goods leads to longer-term satisfaction, and spending money on leisure and services typically strengthens social bonds, which in turn helps amplify happiness. In 2008, for instance, at the downturn of the economy, Wal-Mart noticed a stay-cation trend and started grouping items in its stores to transform any space into a “vacation.” No longer just selling objects like grills and tents, it was selling entire experiences — barbecue foods, inflatable pools, and outdoor furniture at a reduced price. By focusing on the larger story, it was able to focus its design and make a larger impact by creating an entire vacation rather than providing just the pieces. Assuming a consumer’s goal (vacation) was aligned with the outcome (purchase), his or her ultimate happiness had more of an opportunity to flourish.
Experiences — those that we have the potential to create opportunities for — can amplify happiness. While we can’t predict or control what people will or won’t do, we can create potential.
Peaks and stories
When we design the potential for happy experiences, are we certain it’s happiness? Have our users asked to be happy? Adam Phillips suggests what we truly want is to feel frustrated, and happiness is a preemptive strike against frustration. It’s more of a refuge than a transformation.
Even if the entire experience isn’t a good one, people may not remember it. Founder of behavioral economics and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s research reports on the “peak-end” rule, which shows what we remember about the pleasurable quality of an experience is determined almost entirely by two things: 1. how we feel when experiences are at their peak, and 2. how we feel when experiences have ended. We rely on these two-part summaries to remind us of how we felt about experiences. The summary is the one we remember. We’re taking happiness shortcuts.
As designers it’s important to note that what matters far more is the intensity at the peak combined with how people feel at the end, rather than the overall average of the experience. In a talk, Daniel Kahneman reveals the difference between our “experiencing self” and our “remembering self.” Getting confused between them is part of what’s confounding about how we invest in happiness because our “remembering self is a storyteller and that starts with the basic response of our memory. We don’t [actually] set out to tell stories when we set out to tell stories. Our memory tells us stories. That is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story”. Whatever our craft, whether it be book cover design or toothbrushes or websites, we might benefit from considering the narrative that emerges from the experience.
On being ordinary
But it’s not just peaks and stories. In his paper “On Doing ‘Being Ordinary,’” Harvey Sacks analyzed conversation to explore the mechanics of discourse. In doing so, he uncovered ordinariness is a crucial part of everyday conversation. He found what was remarkable about discourse was that it was primarily unremarkable. The very fact that things are ordinary and unremarkable allows the unordinary to stand out. Paul Dourish, in his 2003 landmark paper “What We Talk About When We Talk About Context,” cites the example, “I saw an accident on my way to the bank this morning.” Without the routine of otherwise ordinary events and conversation as a backdrop, it would not be possible to distinguish this solitary one as extraordinary. The ordinary has extraordinary value in isolating meaningful experiences.
Happiness in the wild
Mappiness, part of a research project at the London School of Economics, maps happiness across space. The researchers intend to better understand how people’s feelings are affected by features of their environment — from pollution to noise to green spaces — while they’re doing ordinary things. They hope to publish the research; meanwhile, users who download it can enter data that is charted for them hour by hour over time so that they can visually monitor their own happiness.
Whether as creators or consumers, whether you ascribe to happiness theory or the set point theory of happiness, as another year begins, don’t forget to plan a vacation, take time off — even just a day or an afternoon. You may only remember the peak-end.
But if nothing else, pause and talk about happiness, if only to consider its implications for design, or to dispute them.
