Can happiness be visualized through design? How can design and creativity evoke happiness? And in the age of tongue-in-cheek visual media and mass advertising, do representations of happiness have to be so cynical?

I recently stumbled upon this interesting TED talk, in which graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister discusses the ways that design can portray happiness, and the distinct moments when design has brought unexpected happiness to his life.

Interestingly, Sagmeister cites a couple of urban guerilla projects that reframe the way that people normally interact with the city. (Examples? One project that replaced boring subway signage with graphically identical “life instructions”; another that placed blank voice bubble stickers over existing signage, inspiring passers-by to contribute their own dialogue to a given scene.) From a branding and creativity perspective, these are inspiring examples about how unexpected creativity and design can contribute to the happiness of a visually-savvy audience–on a deeply personal level.

To begin, would you like to introduce yourself: who are you, what do you do?
Ciao, my name is Francesco, I am from Venice, and I’m an interaction designer. Currently I feel very lucky to be working on Thounds, a startup born from my passion for music.

Can you tell us more about Thounds? What is it?
Thounds was born while I was in school: it was my thesis project at Iuav University for a masters degree in interaction design. Back then it was called Riffle. It is a social network, and it’s the ideal place for those who want to express their creativity in music without feeling embarrassed. The main feature is to capture your musical thoughts by recording it directly from your browser, and sharing it with your friends.  This collaboration can lead to a real music track. Actually, “thoughts” is the origin of the name: Thounds is the combination of the words ‘thoughts’ and ‘sounds’.

How long did you work on it? What was the process to get this project done as a thesis?
For my thesis I worked on Thounds for six months, following a really tight deadline. I started from the concept, and went through interviews, discovery, design, prototypes, and user testing.

What happened then?
I got the chance to present my thesis to H-Farm, who really liked it and offered to create a startup to help make my project become real.

What is H-farm? How are you working on Thounds there?
H-Farm is a venture company located in Treviso Italy [yes, where De'Longhi is from too!]. Its aim is to invest in ideas and develop them, and then try to sell them according to the position they have on the market. There are about 200 employees and besides the Italian headquarters, H-Farm has offices in Seattle, London, and is coming soon to Mumbai. The “incubator” process of an idea requires that for the first 3 months the project is refined and defined with the help of a venture partner, an experienced manager. It then goes on to follow an operative roadmap. For one year I’ve been working with the great support of Davide Bartolucci. Besides being the CEO of Shado, a company specialized in TV formats, he’s a manager with a lot of experience in business models focused on monetizing content and internet entertainment.

So it took 18 months from the concept to the beta version. Do you feel Thounds is different now from how you originally envisioned it?
Well, after one year of working with developers, and re-concepting it, for sure the product is different from my original sketches. However the spirit didn’t change. I am extremely happy to have been able to maintain the core concept of this project which was to create something simple that could help people spontaneously collaborate through music.

I read on your twitter that just after a few days there was already a sort of user-made-orchestra on Thounds. Are users participating? I have to say it felt like Christmas when I saw and listened to the first reply to my thound!
Some users are still shy, but those who started to experiment are recording really interesting tracks, and have started to collaborate with people that they didn’t know until a few days ago.

What will be the next steps?
Our task now is to stimulate the users community, perhaps by inviting some famous musicians… we’re working on it.

I know that you were really busy to make the final steps of the beta version, and I know that going online with it was crazy. Is the storm gone by or are you in the eye of it?
For sure in the next moths I’ll still be very busy with Thounds. I am also presenting it around with lectures and demos at festivals and events. So right now I am not thinking about new projects, but for sure I want to play… maybe I’ll build an instrument then.

Is there any chance to meet you or Thounds in the States? And, while we wait, can you make us a thound?
I really hope to come to the States, it would be great. Go to thounds.com and add me (ID: francescofraioli) as a band mate. I uploaded a thound for you, named 160over90. And if you want to be updated on the latest developments of the network, follow it on Twitter or on the blog.

There’s an interesting article in this week’s New Yorker about the development of the advertising campaign for the 3^rd season of Mad Men, which premiers August 16. (An advertising campaign that advertises a show about the tricks of advertising? How postmodern.) The campaign includes a new tag line (“The world’s gone Mad”) and a website that will promote the creation of Mad Men avatars.

The article begs the question: how do you market something to a group that spends its spare time watching a show about the marketing industry? (This is assuming that viewers are intrigued by more than the alcoholism and adultery that runs rampant through the show.)

This might be a particularly polarized example, but I think it’s very reflective of most of the advertising audience these days—a group that is hyper-aware of the conventions behind branding and advertising.  Our media-savvy audience often requires a higher standard of sophistication, humor, intelligence  (or, sometimes, stupidity), in order to be affected by marketing strategies. This awareness is really where the departure into non-traditional, viral, or guerilla advertising takes off, and where the line between Don Draper and the modern creative directors is drawn. Martini anyone?

There was a day and an age where even fast food restaurants (ESPECIALLY fast food restaurants) took great care in crafting signage to lure travelers in off the byway. Now, the joint with the best burgers in all the land (Five Guys) throws up soulless signage that makes them look like a boardwalk dollar store on the verge of bankruptcy. I know you take a lot of pride in your fries, fellas, but how about fixing up the place a little?

So it was with a heavy heart that I learned that the Arby’s in Folsom, PA (known as a landmark to my wife and I as “Big Hat Arby’s”), closed its doors forever last week, and mercilessly tore down its self-aggrandizing 1000-gallon hat sign. I should have seen it coming when they started selling Fajita Flatbread Melts.

This thing was almost bigger than the store itself. When I was a kid, the words lit up in sections to draw you down the sign, until the blinking “is delicious” drove the oh-so-simple point home. Copywriting at its least convincing, made most convincing through some neon acrobatics. Over time, the sign stopped animating, then whole words stopped lighting up, but it was still a comforting presence along MacDade Boulevard. I remember driving past a similar Big Hat in Santa Monica back around 2001 proudly displaying a sign reading “thanks everyone, you saved the hat.” I imagine some sort of citizen’s group launched an a counteroffensive to save an endangered Hat, and I remembered hoping my Hat back home was never threatened by the same wrecking ball. Sadly, corporate must have stripped ours down in the cover of night. Or else I would have been out there like Tank Man, bravely clutching two sacks of French Dips (a secret menu item if you know the handshake).

Big hat, you will be missed. As for the curly fries, horsey sauce, and jamocha shakes, I’ll see you at the Arby’s in Norwood. The one with the plain sign.

Props to Flickr user army.arch for the photo. Check out his fantastic Flickr set of 900 classic signs here. And if you’ve got a Big Montana-like hankerin’ for 137 Big Hat shots, look no further than an entire Flickr group dedicated to said Stetson.

Recently I’ve been noticing a montage trend in commercials. Nike, Gatorade, Bing, and GM have all been using it. Part of me wonders if it is related to the economy. Maybe it is cheaper to buy a whole bunch of stock clips and string them together than it is to produce a commercial from scratch.

So as I’ve been watching these spots there seems to be a type of clip that keeps appearing. That is is the guy running with the prosthetic limb. These spots I am referring to are all basically trying to communicate the same message: “We are rising up against challenges.” Yes, overcoming a disability represents that. But the fact that these commercials are not only using the same montage technique but also the same type of clip makes you wonder if they are all borrowing from one another or if it is just some strange coincidence.

You be the judge. (I’m listing these in the order in which I saw them on TV. You could argue that everyone just copied off of Nike since this spot aired during the Olympics)

Nike spot 27 seconds in:

GM spot 17 seconds in:

Bing Spot 34 seconds in:

My relatives think I have a pretty cool job. I get to wear jeans and t-shirts to work. I get to be creative all day. Occasionally I get to travel to cool places, and do ridiculously fun things like trend research (a.k.a. checking out cool stores). On a fairly regular basis I get to eat at amazing restaurants, some of which I helped with the design and marketing. To top all that off, I get to drink free beer on Fridays from 4:00 – 6:00, with the best coworkers a person could ask for, life is pretty damn good.

However, there are those days where being creative for a living feels like self-inflicted torture. Don’t get me wrong, the days where the ideas are flowing, the pen on paper (or cursor on screen) comes easy, and all the work looks amazing, are the best days ever. Then there are the days where it just doesn’t click,  you become full of doubt about what you do for a living, and you start wondering if Barnes & Noble is hiring. Those days I ask what the hell I got myself into by going to art school.

Yeah, sometimes being creative for a living is hell on the old self-esteem. Especially if you bill by the hour, there’s even more pressure to achieve creativity and originality in a timely manner. I found this recent talk from the TED2009 Conference to be really inspiring, especially if you feel you’ve hit that wall. Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, talks about the emotional pressure of being creative on a regular basis. It’s really inspiring, and aleviates some of that pressure to constantly create the next best thing.

“If a major project is truly innovative, you cannot possibly know its exact cost and its exact schedule at the beginning. And if in fact you do know the exact cost and the exact schedule, chances are that the technology is obsolete.”

Joseph G. Gavin, Jr., former Grumman president, discussing the design of the Grumman lunar module that landed NASA astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon on July 20, 1969.

“Fly Me to the Moon: An Interview with Joseph G. Gavin, Jr.”
Technology Review, 97:5, July, 1994, Page 62.