The mobility of the emotions

In front of a cup of coffee.

Hey Jude, don’t make it bad
take a sad song and make it better
Remember to let her into your heart
Then you can start to make it better
…
The Beatles, 1968.

Certain places excite me more than others. When I visit them, I am reconnected with a very personal, familiar, dreamlike memory, and I feel a great tenderness and vulnerability. It is as if that emotion is generated by the coincidence with a past that meant something, that was shared; the smells, colours, rooms, lighting, the ways of talking or behaving, the eyes of the people with the same landscape imprinted on them.

I am deeply affected by light and colour, and the way they define a place, and by sounds and air and the way they penetrate the intangible.
The quality of these things determines the quality of the emotion – joyful, melancholic, cold or lukewarm. It fluctuates up and down – one of its main functions is to show us how unstable we are, how relative, compared to time and space. They allow us to lose ourselves and then make us work to find the right direction again.

Emotions are profoundly sincere, but in the present time, they are mobile. They can be fleeting, darting, generating an immediate and instant response (like fear) that is sometimes inaccurate. They are like a sketch, an initial idea, the first draft of a project, something that guides us, rightly or wrongly. There is something romantic in this that cannot be defined as a method, but when a clear idea appears before us, it is a moment of grace – everything comes together harmoniously and finally takes flight, like the first step of a dance. It’s hard not to join in.

The idea that a project feeds on people’s collective emotions is nothing new. The great thing is the stubborn resistance that this aspect offers, in such an artificial, technological environment. Excitement becomes a ritual; we want to experience it again; we can even recognise it through a computer screen. It has a personal dimension and a collective one, like experience, and it expresses itself sincerely, before it is overlain by thoughts. The first sensation we feel when we share an emotion is that we are not alone – it is a moment fixed in time, a moment that becomes sacred and will be repeated whenever we properly recreate that experience again.

I believe that the main difference between excitement and wonder is the actual physical or intellectual effects they have on us. Emotion brings about a reaction in our bodies. It is a real, sensory experience that changes our biochemical set-up even just for an instant, a pleasant thrill or an annoying shock. Then it transforms into an idea and becomes part of our intellect, but first it is felt like warmth or heat, it is not a sentiment but a direct perception that makes us feel alive (Think about the work of Bruno Munari – the inclined chair for very short examinations. There is nothing abstract about it).

Things, like people, can encapsulate elements that generate emotions. If they contain love and care, an urge to overcome our limitations, then the experience we have will probably be interesting and positive. These positive emotions are light sources – tiny stars that can illuminate certain dark areas of our existence, that are hard to reconcile with logical thought. They traverse culture at all its levels, sometimes cancelling them out.

The conscious use of language can inject a soul into the objects presented to us, establishing a special harmony between the designer and the user, encouraging a closer, more enlightened relationship.

Sometimes in the world of design we speak of playful, a poetic, lighthearted vision of irony; it shows us a different perspective on things, it escapes rhetoric and lets us talk about anything and everything, augmenting our perception of reality. It helps us overcome our fears, shared by many people, and magically connects us. Poetry and subtlety tell us the history of an object, they reveal things through emotions and the fear of our ungovernable nature acquires a harmless face. Sometimes, this is also the route towards functional and typological innovation.