Dear Michael and Lars,
The fundamental question that underpins all of the research effort in
developing theoretical perspectives and approaches across all design fields
is simple:
'How does 'X' help provide rules to improve how we design?'
Typically, 'X' is the information, theories, outcomes of analyses,
speculations, design approaches, ways of looking.
There are four aspects to this:
1. What is the best information/data to gather? (in this case perhaps
whether to focus the information gathering on aesthetics per se, experience,
or object properties)
2. What is the best way to analyse that information in ways that will be
most useful to 3.
3. What are the most useful ways of developing which 'rules' that can guide
designers
4. What are the most useful rules that can be devised to guide designers
(e.g. make line length between 60 and 75 characters for readability)
The difficult bit is to convert any information from research into rules
that help guide design activity. This is also the bit that theoretically and
philosophically you can usually drive a bus through.
Regardless, developing the 'rules' for design is the primary focus and at
the end of the day its focus is object properties (because object
properties are prior to experiences)
So... If one is lazy and after a quick and dirty approach, the shortcut is
to focus on object properties from the beginning. Hence, the focus of
aesthetics on object properties.
That doesn't mean it is right... Or useful...
Best wishes,
Terry
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Hi Lars (and all),
Thank you Lars, I'll have a read over your paper.
It's not so clear in HCI and interaction design literature how complicated
this relationship between pragmatism and aesthetics might be. I am not
experienced enough with pragmatist philosophy to understand such
intricacies, but from what I can sense, it is still very early days for
pragmatist philosophy in HCI and Interaction design. The notions of
aesthetic experience, brought forward by Graves Petersen and McCarthy and
Wright from Dewey and Bakhtin, offer ways of embracing the aesthetics of
interactive systems as more than just the sum of identifiable, classifiable
qualities possessed by artifacts. That it is as much about what people bring
to experiences as what the designer leaves there (McCarthy and Wright, 2008
and 2005).
For me, a communication designer, it's a breath of fresh air to see a shift
in emphasis from aesthetics in appearance to experience, because it allows
for much deeper involvement. This is pretty much the main proposition of my
exegesis.
I believe that attempts to identify or classify aesthetic qualities, such as
Löwgren and Stolterman's 'experiential use qualities' (Thoughtful
interaction design, 2004) do less to define and pin down aesthetics, but
more to open up possibilities of understanding design with regards to
experience and interactive systems/digital artifacts.
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