Eduardo et al,
So... "useful" or "fit" isn't what Bass meant, I guess.
Getting back to the question of what is beauty, I don't think it's a
difficult to answer as many may think. I'd like to think this kind of work
has been done, but - with apologies - I haven't the time right now to go
find out if it has indeed been done.
1. When we experience beauty, we can relate that experience to
physiological changes.
2. Expose a person to a set of beautiful experiences and a set of
not-beautiful experiences.
3. Consider characteristics of the stimuli that led to those experiences.
You'll likely find sufficient commonalities across the beautiful
experiences that are unique to them and not to the not-beautiful
experiences.
4. Dollars to donuts: exposing that person to any experience, the stimuli
of which include only those that were noted at correlated with beauty, will
cause the person to experience beauty.
5. Do this with many people, and you'll start to distinguish between
characteristics of beauty that can be categorized by region, culture,
background, etc and so on.
6. Now you know (in a scientific sense of "know") what beauty is.
It would likely take years of intensive, ever-deepening research to resolve
the characteristics down to a level that we could build a reasonable
taxonomy of characteristics of beauty. There would be temporal effects that
would change those characteristics over time as society changes and imposes
different experiences on people of different generations. That would
complicate things, but not impossibly.
Considering Don's example of the Minolta logo: I don't think I would call
it "beautiful" but I do find it pleasing. Personally, the experience I have
is one of a certain calmness/stillness, and interest to look closely at the
image in detail, noting items that I already know I'm "attracted" to -
symmetry, simplicity, blue (I like blue graphics more than green, less than
red or yellow - but only in graphics; my choices in colours for clothes is
almost exclusively anything-but-blue - go figure). I do prefer things that
are "horizontal" rather than "vertical," so I like (i.e., find "beautiful")
the horizontal lines in the logo (more than if they'd been 3 vertical
lines). I would have probably liked it more if the brand name were to the
right of the logo instead of underneath for similar reasons.
These are things that work for *me* - I know that I share these particulars
with some, but not all, other people. I would wager that most people who
share my aesthetic also share some types of experiences - perhaps
unconscious associations of past experiences where I perceived certain
shapes while also experiences a really good coffee or a successful grant
application or something, and my brain wired itself to bias my future
experiences in accordance with those associations.
When I was much younger, I once saw a woman who I found so beautiful, it
*literally* took my breath away. I would imagine that even in the case of
the logo, you'd find my heart-rate and respiration changed slightly, my
pupils may have dilated, levels of dopamine and other chemicals increased
in my brain, my body language changed (I leaned in closer to the screen),
etc.
This is all just off the top of my head. But I've found it quite reliable
for me (and even in terms of guessing what my wife might like for, say, a
Xmas present). Anecdotal, to be sure, but much better than the
post-modernist, deconstructionist fluff that gets peddled so often these
days....
\V/_ /fas
*Prof. Filippo A. Salustri, Ph.D., P.Eng.*
Email: [log in to unmask]
http://deseng.ryerson.ca/~fil/
On 4 January 2016 at 16:58, Eduardo corte-real <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Dear Fil,
> If Bass would want to say useful or fit or even perfect or even
> understandable or even beneficial, I think he had enough vocabulary to do
> it.
> Best,
> Eduardo
>
> > No dia 04/01/2016, às 16:33, Filippo Salustri <[log in to unmask]>
> escreveu:
> >
> > On 4 January 2016 at 11:24, Eduardo corte-real <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
> >
> >> Of course that Bass had other “evidences” to move one to solutions. The
> >> interesting thing is that he sees his social mandate as perfectly
> >> legitimated by this stance ("I only care about doing beautiful things")
> >> when he describes his professional action in a an interview to a
> colleague.
> >>
> >
> > Kind of begs the questions of what he calls "beauty" and whether his
> > definition corresponds to anything that the end users of those designs -
> > once implemented - recognize as beneficial....
> >
> > \V/_ /fas
>
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