Smile :)

Do you ever walk past an inanimate object and realize how much it resembles a face or a body part? Often you'll find that a lot of objects, having been designed by humans, will aesthetically relate to our physical attributes whether conscious or not. It must be something we can't help but doing. Our egos dominate a generous part of our minds which kicks into play during this (or any) process, creating resemblance to what we know best, ourselves.

I find discovering these resemblances are usually amusing yet short-lived moments. It's like if you visualized the joy of a great idea as an incandescent light bulb (a common analogy) and compared it to a small LED light. I find human features, often faces, in almost anything like wall plugs, cameras, shoes, lamps, you name it and I do this with more ease than any word search, or Where's Waldo.

One of the most common things that will often glare back at me with an undeniable character-filled face is the front of a car. They roll around town with a twinkle in their bright headlight eyes, and some of them will even beam a smile at you or expose their teeth through their grille, which only brings to mind a flashy hip-hop trend of bedazzling (sorry, I meant blinging out) your teeth from 2005 and the song that started it all, Grillz, by Nelly. But I digress.

The other day, when I went to see Despicable Me, I found the biggest and happiest grin I've ever seen on a car that it would even have the Cheshire cat hissing in envy. The new North American Mazda2 has to be the happiest car I've ever seen. So much so, that in my excitement, I inadvertently turned to Danny and said "The car is smiling!" This brimming car was born for this and has clearly been designed to capture the hearts of cute-seekers all over North America and it even has a cute little green robot sidekick. Smiley over here (the Mazda), will mostly likely captivate the unsuspecting souls of their target market of trendy young adults (18-25) mostly females, it certainly did the trick on me.

I do however, find it interesting that the cute-seeker approach was only applied on the North American model. When looking at the Mazda 2's launch site which directs you to specific countries, it seems Canada and the US are the only ones with the smiley car. It just goes to show that culture must indeed have a substantial effect on design. Psychological features like the smile might work on us, or maybe even in parts of Asia but apparently not in Europe.

Like I said, I like it :) Maybe it doesn't help that I'm a young Canadian-Korean female who really likes cute things but I also appreciate the design.