The IDSYMPOSIUM'08 takes place at the Stuttgart Media University on November 27.

* Lunch is available at Stuttgart Medie University's cafeteria S-Bar

Paul Hekkert

What is beneficial is pleasant

Starting from the disputed claim “What is beautiful is usable” (Tractinsky, Katz & Ikar, 2000; Hassenzahl, 2008), in this presentation we will argue that both concepts in the simile have been understood too narrowly to grasp the rationale behind this link. If we extend visual beauty to pleasantness in all sensory domains and consider usability as the design counterpart of an environment that is appropriate for our actions, we can start to understand when usable designs are considered beautiful, and when they are not.

Over the past decades, most research in experimental aesthetics was confined to visual stimuli like abstract patterns and artworks, with few studies devoted to the appreciation of auditory stimuli such as music. On the basis of this empirical work and a manifold of theoretical studies, a number of aesthetic principles have been identified (see e.g. Hekkert & Leder, 2008).

When, following its eighteenth’ century definition, aesthetics is defined as “the pleasure attained from sensory perception”, one starts to wonder to what extent these visual aesthetic principles are also valid for other sensory domains. In Hekkert (2006), a first attempt was made to develop a rationale for these principles by exploring the underlying logic of sensory pleasantness. In line with various other authors (e.g. Johnston, 2003; Ramachandran & Hirstein, 1999), it was proposed that people have come to derive aesthetic pleasure from perceiving environmental features or patterns that are functionally beneficial, i.e., adaptive to their sensory systems. Although some of these functions may be modality-specific, the sensory systems also have a lot in common and work together in e.g., signaling potential threats, object identification and navigation. From this joint functioning, we can explain and may derive various aesthetic principles that hold across the senses (see Schifferstein & Hekkert, 2008).

In this presentation we will examine the extent to which these functionally beneficial features and patterns contribute to a product’s usability. In those cases where such a relationship can be demonstrated, we can predict that an object’s visual attractiveness, or its pleasantness in one of the other sensory domains, will correlate with its usability. In other cases, such a correlation will not be observed. The present paper could thus serve as a source and inspiration for new empirical work on the conditions under which usability enhances beauty, or vice versa.

Thomas Jacobsen

Neuro-cognitive psychology of aesthetics

The investigation of aesthetic processing has constituted a longstanding tradition in experimental psychology, of which experimental aesthetics is the second-oldest branch. Building on this heritage and drawing on a host of related scientific disciplines, I will argue that a strongly interdisciplinary psychology of aesthetics can be fruitfully approached from at least seven different perspectives, each with multiple levels of analysis: diachronia, ipsichronia, mind, body, content, person and situation. Based on this framework, neurocognitve methodology can be employed to illuminate the temporal course and neural underpinnings of aesthetic processing. Eventually, this work may coalesce into a unified theory of aesthetic processing.

Meinald T. Thielsch

Experimental approaches on aesthetics and usability

There is an increasing trend to talk about constructs beyond usability, especially emotional aspects are often discussed (Hassenzahl, 2007). Many researchers stress the importance of aesthetics (e. g. Tarasewich, 2001; Tractinsky & Hassenzahl, 2005) and a lot of studies adress the relation between usability and aesthetics – mostly based on survey data and correlation analysis. After a clear definition of the constructs, as far as this is momentarily possible, this talk will discuss the current interpretations for the relation between the two constructs and will give a slightly different perspective based on experimental data.

Christoph Johannes Häberle

Colour preferences – between social convention and individual aesthetic perception

Visual communication is the quickest way to convey information. In split seconds colours, forms and surface structures pass on emotionally and intuitively essential information about our vis-à-vis. Attention is roused, assiciations, perceptions and feelings were engendered, meanings and values defined. In social communities signs have special meanings (denotations, connotations). This conventionalized symbolic of signs is the elementary basis in a society’s non-verbal specific communication system. Influenced by development processes within a social system non-verbal communication systems are subject to permanent change. Thus every communication system is a reflex of the socio-cultural and intellectual discussion in a social community concentrating itself in specific principles of perception, thinking and understanding. These specific patterns of perception are also responsible for aesthetic imagination and ideals. To the highest degree they are shaped by these socio-specific comprehension principles; they are contextually associated and subject to dynamic change in use. In a complex manner individual aesthetic ideas and preferences are influenced by the collective ideas of a specific system.

For more than ten years Christoph Häberle, expert in colours, is engaged in the subject of colour preferences in various "fields of life", the consumption attitudes of different target groups and people’s general treatment of colours. For two years he studied in more than ten countries in Europe in real every day situations colour treatment in different cultural communities, their colour preferences and colour decisions – in social every day life as well as in the domain of modern art, design and architecture.

His results show clearly that there exists a very different understanding and affinity to colours, individually as well as collectively. Natural, cultural, social and individual influences are the reason therefore. Colours and forms thereby speak an unequivocal language.Only he who understands the principle according to which people encode signs, is able to communicate well-aimed.

Peter Wright

The aesthetics of experience-centred design

The theme of this conference, aesthetics and usability, leads most obviously to a consideration of the aesthetics of interaction. Such a focus is useful because it draws our attention away from preoccupations with ocular aesthetics of form and our visual experience of the world, towards a more embodied and relational or dialogical aesthetics. Many researchers working in the intersection of art, design and social science have argued the need for this shift in focus, and in this paper, I suggest that a dialogical aesthetics could be useful for interaction design too.
Somatics and somaesthetics, are areas of research which focus on body-based practices including meditation and dance. They view aesthetic experience as fundamentally somatic, multi-sensorial, and visceral. Relational or dialogical aesthetics focuses on the inter-human relations that a work expresses, produces or prompts. I will describe three interaction design projects which can be understood in terms of an embodied dialogical aesthetics. These projects point to a terrain that explores our experience of relations between subjectivity and otherness, self and place, self and community, self and technology. Through the relationships that participants form with artist and other participants, they engage in a creative interaction which not only provides an intrinsically aesthetic experience of technology, but also supports relationship building, reflective dialogue, and connections between people and places, artists and participants.

Marc Hassenzahl

Consequences of beauty

The visual appearance of an interactive product – its beauty (or the lack of it) – has a deep effect on how we think about the product. Beauty, for example, adds value; at least some people are willing to pay a little bit more for a beautiful product. But it also has consequences beyond this. It is an important starting point for inferring other quality attributes, such as usability or social value. Furthermore, it is crucial for creating an emotional attachment to a product. Some researchers even suspect beautiful things to work better – if not objectively, at least in the perception of its users. But there is also a downside to beauty, the "dilemma of beauty", which sometimes leads people to prefer a less beautiful, more usable product to a more beautiful, but less usable, although people predict more later enjoyment from the beautiful.

The talk will present and discuss empirical evidence for the diverse consequences of beauty, thereby demonstrating the multi-faceted and profound impact beauty has on the way we perceive and evaluate products.

Axel Platz

Beauty matters – but what the hell is beauty?

While experts are probably broadly agreed on the basic principles of aesthetics, there are substantial differences with regard to their visual interpretation. In turn, designers and public differ widely in terms of conventions of perception and taste and consequently in their evaluation of the design object.

As the relevance of visual design is no longer called in question, as product quality is also a question of beauty, the real question is: What is beauty?

As Andy Warhol said: "All is pretty."

Kees Overbeeke

Designing for aesthetics in interaction

The Department of Industrial Design goes for the impossible: to reconcile reason and intuition, abstraction and practice, in the pursuit of highly-interactive dynamic systems. The challenge for the Designing Quality in Interaction group is to answer the question ‘how to design for interaction with highly interactive dynamic systems?’ This challenge consists of two major areas. Firstly, the dynamical character of the new systems to design. Designers are typically trained to design beautiful static objects. The new systems will behave. How? The task is to device a new ‘behaving form’ language, a new beauty in interaction. Beauty leads to the second area. Design transforms the world: designers strive for a better world. This poses the question. Is the beautiful also ethical? Also better? Designers are firmly rooted in society. Maybe this is the department’s biggest challenge. How to educate, not just teach, students to become humanior, more human?