Written by Brenna Kaplan.
Photograph by Crosby Ignasher.
World-renowned graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister presented his lecture, “Design and Happiness,” at the Trustees Theater Monday at 6 p.m. He broke the ice with an unconventional story about his visit to the Coney Island Aquarium.
“This sea cow reveals a giant boner,” he said. “And it looked us in the eye and slowly goes down, it goes down, goes down and it gives itself a blow job.”
A flustered sign language interpreter struggled to keep up as the audience of students, professors and the public roared with laughter and applause.
Graphic design professor Robert Newman introduced Sagmeister.
“He reveals the magic in words and sentences,” Newman said. “He shows us our own thoughts.” Newman also noted Sagmeister’s “ability to be absurd and profound in the same sentence.”
The first graphic design speaker for SCAD Style in at least ten years, Sagmeister talked about his most recent large-scale project, “The Happy Show,” which debuted at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and has since toured in Paris, Toronto and Los Angeles. Sagmeister’s firm, Sagmeister and Walsh, closes up shop every seven years and focuses on experimentation for a year. In this interim he began focusing his attention on the study of happiness. What are the factors that influence happiness? Where are the happiest people? What can we do to be more like them? His main influence and inspiration came from Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Happiness Hypothesis.”
In true Sagmeister style, this information was presented through a range of hand-rendered experimental typography, multimedia video clips, and (some sexually explicit) infographics. Sagmeister displayed his findings in “The Happy Show.”
A video clip of the exhibition showed visitors viewing a compilation of sugar cubes spelling “step up to it,” which lit up when they smiled at it. Each face in the gallery brightened as people began to interact with the work, evoking the same emotion from lecture attendees.
“I liked when he showed the museum, the project and how they filmed all the audience reactions,” said third-year interior design major Valerie Name of Venezuela. “How you can see all their faces and smiles, that was powerful.”
Sagmeister said that we as a culture suffer from negativity bias – we prefer things to be bad rather than good. There is also the principle of presentism, meaning we can only see things from our present point of view. We are a culture of instant gratification and often have trouble projecting into the long-term future of our situations. These factors, Sagmeister suggests, are the reason we must understand happiness in broader terms. We have to get over the crime, persistent noise, inequality and oppression, and long commute to work in order to be happy.
Sagmeister’s overarching idea was much broader than just his exhibition: happiness is a skill just as much as running a marathon or studying for a test. While showcasing his graphic design and typography, Sagmeister encouraged the audience to take more risks, even if it was just offering a flower to a stranger.
To demonstrate the benefit of risk-taking, he showed a video of him approaching women on the streets of New York. This section allowed the audience to connect with Sagmeister on a human level.
“Everyone knows that feeling, you know,” said fourth-year graphic design student Kristian Stojek of The Woodlands, Texas. “Everyone gets it, gets the butterflies in their stomach. I could respond to that easily.”
And perhaps it was Sagmeister’s ability to visually express how all people feel on a basic, instinctual level that made his lecture such a hit. Newman expressed his appreciation of the designer’s honesty and body of work.
“He as a professional sets an exceptional example for not only students to look to, but for me to be able to point to and say, ‘This is the way that you need to live your life and do your work,’” Newman said. “Have these kind of ways in which you can connect yourself to human beings and then work through the filter of those connections.”
Sagmeister finished just as quirkily as he started. An auditorium full of people rose to sing a giddy karaoke-style song written by the man himself. In conclusion, Sagmeister left the audience with some words of inspiration.
“Watching me talk about happiness won’t really make you happy,” he said. It was up to the listener to grasp that pushing creative boundaries and having the guts to take risks, small and great, are what satisfy the happy designer’s mind.
