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The major project I’ll be devoting this year to is my master’s thesis, exploring the subject Aesthetics of Joy.

Aesthetics of Joy lies at the foundation of an idea I want to advance called emotional sustainability, which is about cultivating more sustainable relationships between people and their objects through greater attention to the emotional quality of the design. Much has been said about designing for sustainability in recent years, but nearly all of it is functional. Yes, we need to design with less toxic materials, make lighter and less material-intensive products, and design for disassembly and recycling. But if we are to create a more sustainable world, we will need to address the issue of chronic overconsumption, and to do this, we as a culture will need to completely transform our emotional relationship with our stuff.

The current paradigm runs on high passions and an addictive, ecstatic rush at point of sale. This vein of emotions is not sustainable in human relationships and it’s not sustainable in human-object relationships either. Much of design feeds into this emotional roller coaster by playing within an aesthetics of consumerism which offers an intense but superficial pleasure and little in the way of a long-term relationship. So, we need to rethink the messages we are encoding in the way we design products and experiences.

Many emotions will play a role in restoring the emotional sustainability of objects. But I feel that joy is special in a way that is still somewhat ineffable to me. Perhaps there is a biological basis that I will discover in my research, but for now the one essential observation is that joy is a renewable emotion that lends itself to durability. Joy’s essential property is that the same object or experience can trigger joy over and over again. Swinging on a swingset, blowing bubbles, or putting one’s hand into a bowl of jellybeans can be a virtually inexhaustible reservoir of joy; like a sun for the psyche, it will never run out. This puts it in direct opposition to the thrilling nature of today’s consumption, which is based on novelty and intensity, and ultimately fizzles out.

Joy is a very particular thing. It is not happiness, which is too vague and encompassing a positive feeling. Nor is it contentment, with its snug, muted warmth. It is not euphoria, animating the spine with shimmering electricity, nor is it the zen-like feeling we call bliss. Joy inhabits that ineluctable space between wonder and pleasure, neighboring delight, but somehow more profound. Joy is momentary, but not temporary. Surprising, but not necessarily in a spectacular way. It is personal but at the same time universal, an essential emotion that renews and uplifts the human psyche.

It is these universals that I’m after in this project. I want to distill down the essence of joy, the basic aesthetic and intellectual principles that are capable of being experienced by everyone. Over the next 11 months, I’ll be doing fieldwork, concept tests, and interviews with experts that will hopefully clarify what these universals are, and I’ll post thoughts and ideas as I go.