Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness

by Ingrid Fetell Lee

But what to do if you wish you could live in a house of air instead of one made of brick or stone? I thought back to that Chinese study, where just looking at pictures of balloons and rocks created an unconscious priming effect, and it reminded me of a concept designers call visual weight. Visual weight describes how heavy things look to our eye, and it doesn’t always correlate to the actual mass of an object. For example, light colors have less visual weight than dark ones. Translucent materials appear lighter than those that are opaque, and slender objects appear lighter than bulky ones. Negative space is also tied to visual weight, so objects with perforations or spaces appear lighter than solid ones. Knowing this, we can imagine ways to create a space that borrows some of the lightness we find in bubbles or clouds. By using light colors and sheer fabrics, leggy furnishings and translucent accessories, we can bring some of the lightness of the sky down to earth.