Happiness is many things to many different people. To Julian Schnabel it is clearly the idea of ceaseless creativity that leads – sometimes inadvertently – to happiness. If Schnabel’s philosophy is that there is no past or future, but an endless present, then his art becomes a means of simultaneously existing in as many places as possible. Happiness for him is the bi-product of multiple acts of creativity. Separating where creativity ends and happiness begins is difficult to describe, as chef Carlo Cracco found. Alberto Alessi meanwhile used the history of his company to challenge our notions of what is serious and what makes us happy.
No architect or designer can have made an object designed to simply make people happy as successfully as Aldo Rossi’s designs for La Conica produced by Alessi. To find happiness a degree of mischief is helpful. Both Edson Matsuo and Elio Fiorucci clearly see joy as a motivating force in both creating and consuming; buying things can make you happy!
For Vladimir Pirojkov happiness was a concept he understood in relation to design through his own personal experience. Having worked in the car industry, designing the interiors of the Prius and Yarus for Toyota amongst a host of other roles in the automobile sector, he explained he was driven into the aeronautical sector through understanding he was dissatisfied with what he was doing. In doing so he has arrived at a proposal for a combined car and plane vehicle. Happiness may be hard to attain but the meaningful pursuit of it leads us on to creative and surpass ourselves.