I took my wife to a trendy Scottsdale pizzeria called La Grande Orange for Valentine’s Day. I’ll write about the restaurant another time, but there’s something more pressing on my mind.

We had a great view of the large plasma television mounted above the bar. The Olympics were on and I happened to glance up at the screen in the middle of the Russian skater’s performance; the timing couldn’t have been better.

The sound was off to avoid interference with the restaurant’s sound system, which had been playing a mix of modern dance tracks and downbeat trip-hop. Instead of a passionate interpretation of a dramatic orchestral piece, we saw the type of uncontrolled flailing you’d expect from a drunken clubgoer…which got me thinking…

Human sensory perception is quite remarkable, and yet easy to confuse. The sensory elements (music and video) at the pizzeria were not in themselves inappropriate, but the cumulative effect was inappropriate and our response was laughter. Sensory elements reinforce themselves when combined appropriately, and result in humor (intentional AND unintentional) when they are not.

This is not a new idea. These principles govern every facet of design and multimedia production, it’s just that we’re not always conscious of them. Certain things “feel” right or “feel” wrong, but most of us are hard-pressed to explain why. One responsibility of a designer is to explore and manipulate the cumulative effect of the senses to communicate something. Humor in general is fairly subjective, but the unintentional humor created by sensory contradictions is universally appreciated (to me).