Stefan Stagmeister: The Happy Show

I thoroughly enjoyed The Happy Show exhibit. I really admire Sagmeister's design work, so it was a pleasure to look into his personal thoughts and visions in an interactive setting.

I think what I liked most about the exhibit is how personable it was, each and every part of it. The text that accompanied each installment looked so physically because it was handwritten, making it feel like I was veering right into the pages of his journal. And then literally, the text content had a conversational tone to it, even when he was explaining different statistics and data. Reading became like visiting with an old friend. I think the personable-ness made the exhibit more interesting than others, and also made me more inclined to participate than others.

Additionally, it was quite the opportunity to view Sagmeister's typographic installments. Photography and video alike were mesmerizing. One that stuck out to me in particular was the video that read "Over time I get used to everything and start taking it for granted." There's just something so human and honest about that thought, and the visual content he supplies to spell it out makes it all the more alluring. I found myself relating this and his other life epiphanies to my own experiences, and I think it's really cool when design can do stuff like that.

The section "How to Define Problems" in Ellen Lupton's Graphic Design Thinking: Beyond Brainstorming explores the creative process and how to effectively understand what clients want. Lupton's ideas about conducting research apply directly to Sagmeister's creative process. He has gained insight from psychologists, anthropologists and historians, and interviews with people, and he's finding out even more from the exhibit right now. In the gumball machine installment (where one can take a gumball from dispensers ranging from 1-10, 1 symbolizing least happy and 10 symbolizing most happy), for instance, he is collecting data about how happy people think they feel. And in the installment where he invites people to draw their symbol of happiness, he is finding out what specifically makes people happy. This is all in efforts to solve his own problem of figuring out what happiness is and how it can be achieved.