27-06-2012, 05:49 PM
Engineering aesthetics and aesthetic ergonomics: Theoretical foundations and a dual-process research methodology
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Introduction
While aesthetics and appearance have always played a role in product and system
design, this role will dramatically increase in the 21st century as the society and
market become more sophisticated and the manufacturing technologies become
further developed. To compete and succeed in the market place, manufacturers will
have to look beyond reliability and physical quality, and pay more and more
attention to the aesthetics and subjective quality of their products. In the more
established technology sectors, product reliability is a ‘given’ to the customers and is
often regarded as a basic qualifying ‘ticket’ to enter the market place. Other features
and metrics, such as usability and aesthetics often separate the winners and losers.
Although industrial and product designers are keenly aware of the importance of
design aesthetics, they rely largely on their ‘educated guesses,’ ‘talents’, or ‘gutfeelings’
in making design decisions (Noblet 1993). Some of them also consult trend
analyser’s ‘hunches’ and predictions.
Engineering aesthetics
The scientific discipline ‘engineering aesthetics’ should address two major questions:
(1) how can we use engineering and scientific methods to study aesthetic concepts in system and product design? (2) How do we incorporate engineering and scientific
methods in the aesthetic design and evaluation process (beyond designer’s intuitions
and trend analyser’s ‘hunches’)?
As discussed later in this article, philosophers and art critics have been debating
about the nature of beauty and other aesthetic concepts for a long time. Although
these debates may offer important insights into aesthetic questions and provide
useful perspectives from which we can examine aesthetic concepts, these debates are
not, and they were not meant to be, scientific studies.
Theoretical foundations
Philosophical theories
Although most philosophers agree that not all aesthetic judgments are about art, the
philosophy of aesthetics is largely a philosophy of art. Discussions of aesthetic issues
of art and beauty can be traced back to ancient Greek philosophy, but Kant’s
Critique of Judgment (Kant 1790/1952) was generally regarded as the foundational
work that established aesthetics as a distinct discipline within philosophy. The topics
discussed by Kant such as the analysis of the beautiful and the sublime, the logic of
aesthetic judgments, and the moral function of the aesthetic are still among the
central issues of aesthetics today.
A dual-process research and evaluation methodology
As illustrated in Figure 3, aesthetic appraisal or evaluation of products and systems
is multidimensional, multimodal, and interactive. The theories and research
approaches described above either focus on one aspect or dimension of aesthetic
response or are qualitative in nature. To achieve a comprehensive, rigorous, and
quantitative understanding of aesthetic responses in a design context, we need to ask
two sets of questions. The first set is ‘top-down’: what is the conceptual and
mathematical structure of the aesthetic constructs in question? What are the major
psychological and physical dimensions involved? How do we measure and scale these
dimensions (ordinal, interval, or ratio scale)? How are the dimensions related to each
other and what is the relative importance of each dimension? What type of
multidimensional evaluation scale can be developed to measure the aesthetic
construct with adequate validity and reliability?