I want to give a little theory about aesthetics in design. I'm using the term theory fairly loosely, bacause there is, really isn't very much established theory that relates to aesthetics in design but these are some preliminary thoughts on the subject. This is going to be based in large part on my book on design, and in particular on chapter seven, which is also called aesthetics in design. And so, for more detail and for references, please see chapter seven. I started this module by using the example of the Tesla Roadster, and argued that the aesthetic response to an artifact is the immediate involuntary attraction or revulsion. Based on information that comes in through the sensory system, and it's usually visual. And I think most people have some kind of reaction to this image. And I want to use this as motivation to then talk about some theory, as to what it is that drives that reaction? What is it about this artifact that drives that reaction? So I'm going to introduce the theory and then I'm going to come back and we're going to re-visit this example. I think the best foundation for a theory of aesthetics and design comes from evolutionary psychology. It's been said that we live in a modern world, but that we're equipped with a stone age mind. And, the truth behind that saying is that most of our cognitive adaptations, that is most of the, the processes that our brain uses have evolved over a hundred thousand generations or two or three million years, and haven't changed very much in the modern, in modern times. And so, since the aesthetic, since the aesthetic response, is a response that we, we have with our stone age mind. Then, it must be based on some adaptations that were developed in our distant, evolutionary past. And so, I want to give a way to think about that, which is shown here. This is a figure from the book. Let's imagine that we're exposed to some artifact. I've shown here a hammer. And we experience it through some kind of sensory interface. Let's for the moment just keep it simple and imagine that's through our eyes. and down here I've shown time and. Preference, either attraction or revulsion to an object, to an artifact changes over time. That is, we might start out reasonably positive on something. As, as time plays out, we might become more positive. And then, as more time plays out, we might become more negative. And, in fact, over the very long time frame. Say, over days or months, we might do some research on an object. And, and, and develop an even different preference, or a different response to it. And. What I'm doing in this theory is defining the immediate response, that is the response that plays out from something like half a second to a minute or two as the aesthetic response as a way to distinguish it from the analytical response that we might develop over time. I'd also like to argue that. Our aesthetic response, or what we call our aesthetic response is actually many different cognitive mechanisms that play out simultaneously. Our brains are massively parallel. They don't, our brain doesn't process information sequentially using an algorithm one after another. Instead, many different cognitive mechanisms process information very rapidly and. When we have a sense of attraction or revulsion, we're essentially integrating computations that are happening over lots of different kinds of inputs. So what I've tried to show here in this diagram is that there's some very basic sensing that happens when we're exposed to an artifact. we sense light and motion, and maybe. Ten milliseconds, then we start to notice color in maybe a hundred milliseconds, and then we can start to notice things like texture, geons or geometric elements. And then we start to notice things like taste, smell, temperature, rhythm, gloss, symmetry, pattern, and so forth. It isn't until minutes or hours later that we can start to. Our brains start to. Develop preferences around status or craftsmanship or attraction or other kinds of attributes of that object. So our aesthetic response is really formed from these very primitive, very basic computations that our brain does based on, usually based on vision, based on seeing an object. And those computations have to be based, if you think about it, they really have to based in our distant evolutionary past. Fortunately, there's been some very interesting research that shows what some of those mechanisms are about and why they contribute to aesthetics in design. So I'm just going to give a few examples of these. The first example, is the example of gloss. This is the Apple iPhone 5 and Apple products, particularly the iPhone, use gloss quite effectively. And as, as humans we are attracted to gloss almost universally, especially initially and research that psychologists have done suggests that our fundamental attraction to gloss in artifacts is based on the evolutionary advantage that our predecessors had in being able to detect water, and so, if you can imagine our ancestors on the desert, in the savannah, 2.5 million years ago, those who were able to detect water had a survival and reproductive advantage over those that were not able to detect water and the, one of the only objects that is glossy in our evolutionary past is the surface of water. And so, what's happened in modern times is that. Largely unintentionally, I think. We, as designers, have discovered that we can, we could stimulate that same response in users or consumers by applying gloss to products. If you, the experiments that have been done on this are really interesting. So the one that, the notable one I'm thinking about, is one in which researchers gave children. Toys that were, had two different surface finishes. A glossy finish and a matte surface. And babies invariably prefer the glossy toys. Indeed, they spend almost no time playing with the toys that have a matte finish. And indeed, the infants are observed licking the glossy toys, which gives some indication that it really is about water. And that that's pretty fundamental in the way people respond to objects. All right, so that's gloss. The second example of an adaptation is what I call the cute adaptation. This is used widely in design, often quite intentionally. The Volkswagen new Beetle is an example of playing a cute trick on users. So if you look at the face of the Beetle, it has forward facing big round eyes. It has a big smile, and it has rounded features. Those are the hallmark of cute features. And if you think about it a little bit, the evolutionary adaptation for cute is quite clear, which is that babies are cute, the young of the species. Are cute, and there was a clear evolutionary advantage to humans who were attracted to babies, that is babies that got attention because of the cute response are ones that survived. And that the, there's evolutionary pressure to, to like cute, basically. And, so that trick gets played in making artifacts cute. And, if you think about it, it's, it's, it's not that flattering to our cognitive abilities that we can, by making. This 2000 pound or one ton object, that's made out of steel. By just rounding its features. Putting some eyes on it and a smile. That we can cause our brains to think its cute, and to react positively to it. But it's a very deep and, and quite effective technique that's used in aesthetics to evoke a positive response. Okay, the third example I want to give is that we often have a response based on what I'd call our physics computer. Our basic physics computer. As humans, we developed an ability to make predictions about structures, and dynamics of objects. And, safety related to perches and walkways and so forth. So this is an example of, this is actually an attraction at the south rim of the Grand Canyon in Grand Canyon National Park in the United States, in Arizona. This is an attraction called the Sky Walk. And, tourists are allowed to walk out over the Grand Canyon. You, you can't see it in this image, but the floor of the Sky Walk is also glass. So you are essentially walking out over a cliff that is perched maybe 5000 feet above the floor of the canyon below. Now, most people, when exposed to this attraction, have an immediate revulsion. They basically want to turn and run, as opposed to walking out onto that thing. And that's because, humans developed an ability to make predictions about whether you walked out on, when you walked out on a tree limb, it was going to break or not or whether when you stood on a rock, if the rock was going to fall over and those were very useful in our evolutionary past. But, when we're exposed to artifacts that trick that physics computer we get an immediate negative reaction. Now, in this case it's kind of interesting, because the immediate negative. Reaction is an aesthetic response but it's superseded by a subsequent analytical response that says oh, well I'm pretty sure that I'm not the first person to walk out on that walkway. And that in fact even today, 2000 people went out on it today and maybe millions over the course of the last few years. So it's probably quite safe. So, I'll go ahead and do it. And in fact we get, we get some satisfaction or entertainment value out of doing something that messes with our physics computer. Now, you wouldn't normally think of. The physics computer is an aesthetic component of a product, or an artifact, but I want to use that as an, as an illustration that, that some of what we lump into aesthetics, are other kinds of immediate responses of attraction or revulsion based on our sensory input. And only some of them do we think of normal, only some of them fall nicely into the category of beauty. In this case, this one is what I would consider more, as I say, more the physics computer. Now let me give an example of how that plays out in a furniture design. This is a desk that I like quite a lot, designed by Massimo Scagliotti, and it's called the Xeno Desk; and it's an example, if you look at it. If you look at it for a minute, I, I'ld be very surprised if you didn't find it. Intriguing and also a little bit strange. You probably are thinking, wait a second, will that even stand up, and indeed. When you look at it a little. A little longer you realize that yes, in fact, the geometry of this desk is such that it is stable, but. What Scagliotti is doing is deliberately messing with our physics computer in order to make this an intriguing object. Now if I go back to cute, let me just go back to cute here for a minute, and say that cute is actually a special case of making an inanimate object animate. That is, giving it some animal characteristics; and cute happens to be making it. Like a little baby, human. But there are other forms of animation, or creating, getting an object an, animal, imparting an animal-like quality to an object. So, if you look carefully at this desk, you probably. Can see a little creature that is walking in circles. Its feet are pointed on direction on one side, one direction on the other. And you can imagine a little creature that had feet that, like the legs of this table, and it would walk in circles. Now if you think that I'm just making that up, if you look carefully at the leg of that table, I think you'll notice that Scollati put in essentially a paw. On the feet of that, of that table. He's, he's, he's playing tricks with us. And he's making this object not only mess with our physics computer, but he's imparting it with animate qualities, with animal qualities, through the use of paws and feet. Which make it a pretty intriguing object for us as humans. And I think that mostly is playing off of our evolutionary past in that we got good at detecting creatures, being interested in creatures. And, and using, and in this case also, responding to notions of stability and and strength in objects. All right, now if you believe me that. Evolutionary psychology explains a lot of what it is that. That builds our responses, our aesthetic responses, then you may, you may still. Challenge me, around the question of whether aesthetics can also be culturally determined. So for instance, this is the hip-pop artist 50 Cent, and. My teenage sons like 50 Cent, and they're attracted to his apparel and to, for instance, his bling, which is the glossy stuff hanging around his neck and on his wrist. I am not. Now my children and I share a lot of genetic material. We have the same evolutionary past. How is it possible that my children could like this and I couldn't? If, in fact, our aesthetic response is buried deep within our evolutionary past. It should be invariant across the species. My resolution of that dilemma or that challenge to the theory, is that indeed. There is a certain pattern here, which is culturally determined and, or which, which is interpreted in a culturally determined context. So the pattern here, the aesthetic pattern here, is that teenagers are attracted to objects that, annoy their parents, that, that help to separate them from the adults of their tribe or of their families. And that was probably a very useful evolutionary attribute in society, that as teens developed and got a little bit older, they benefited from creating some distance or some separation from the elders, from the people, the older in their communities. And so. They, they developed an attraction to any symbols or artifacts that, that annoyed or were distanced from the adults. And so, this is a good example of how that plays out in, in the twenty first century. Obviously 50 Cent, the specific reaction to 50 Cent is not based on our distant evolutionary past. But the, the cultural pattern of teens responding in a different way to something than adults could well be. Based very deeply in our evolutionary past, and that could be instantiated or interpreted within the context of the particular objects and artifacts that exist in our society today. Alright, so that's, those are just some examples of how I think evolutionary psychology informs aesthetics in design. Let's return now to the Tesla example, and with our new skills and knowledge, let's deconstruct or analyze this object. So, if I take for instance, if you look at the notion of animation and cute and the creatures here, I hope you all see some creatures here. First of all, this is the opposite of cute. there is nothing at all cute about this. but there's a lot of animation in this. That is, this object is imbued, been imbued with a real animal sense. The animal sense I see when I look at it is, I see eyes that are on the surface of a very streamlined form. I see a big mouth with some nasty looking teeth in it I even see a little. Couple little protrusions here and then I see some gills. What I see here I see either a skate or a shark and that's the opposite acute that's really the game. This, the front of this vehicle is playing, is it's really playing off a very lethal sea creature which imparts the kind of image and association that Tesla would very much like to have in its, in its early adopters. The second thing that's going on is clearly gloss. Gloss is a, is a trick played in, in virtually every automobile design. Although there are some very interesting new vehicles that have matte finishes, which I think are used for in getting attention, but as a first order aesthetic response gloss, tends to work very well, and you see a lot of gloss on automobiles. The other, you, there's some physics computer stuff going on here, the way this car is angled, and the way the, the lower. And the front end is lower than the rear end, suggests a kind of falling forward. It gives it a certain dynamism related to motion, at least it does for me, and I think that's part of what's going on with it. And then, lastly there's even culture imparted here. If you look at the air scoops here, and certainly the red color and the badge on the front, that's all evoking Ferrari the classic Italian Ferrari car and as, as some of you know, the, the Tesla is indeed based on and, and was produced, this particular Tesla was manufactured by Lotus cars. And so it's got a little bit of a Lotus Elise look to it as well. And that is really a cultural element that's being invoked in this particular design. It's a throwback or reminder of those cultural icons. So hopefully you're convinced that, that aesthetics are. A, a cognitive response that's pretty deeply wired into our brains. And that's why aesthetics are so effective in attracting people to objects, and getting people to love objects. And, the theory of aesthetics is only really just being developed but hopefully these few ideas of, of gloss cubed, physics computer animation and cultural symbols are, are a starting place for thinking about what a theory of aesthetics might be.
