*Experiential Aesthetics: A Framework for Beautiful Experience [Gajendar, U.]
Taken from: Experiential Aesthetics: A Framework for Beautiful Experience
GAJENDAR, U. (2008) Experiential Aesthetics: A Framework for Beautiful Experience. Interactions: Magazine of the Association of Computer Machinery. 15 (September/October). pp6-10.
“we would discover that the noble pursuit motivating a great majority of designers (not analysts or researchers or strategists) is the creation of something, quite frankly, beautiful. One of the pioneers of American industrial design, Buckminster Fuller, captured this succinctly: “When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”” (p6)
“Take graphic design: posters, logos, brochures, cafe menus, and so forth. The driving purpose is effective communication of a message, amplified by a choreography of visual elements — shape, color, type, image—to elicit an emotional and behavioral response,” (p6)
“Of course beauty still survives. Our understanding of beauty must evolve with the rapidly changing sets of problems and opportunities toward a powerful conception that I label an “integrative aesthetic experience.” Let’s briefly unpack this phrase:
• Integrative. Beauty must be repositioned away from surface effects toward a cumulative sense of how fundamental elements (style, performance, utility, and story) work in concert to achieve something memorable and desirable, thus deserving repeat purchase and positive testimonial.
• Aesthetic. Aesthetic implies a complete and total sense of human value connecting to the consumer on multiple levels: emotional, sensual, and reflective or intellectual. This, incidentally, maps to Don Norman’s recent writings about the tiered levels of a pleasurable product’s impact, as well as Gianfranco Zaccai’s declaration for redefining beauty, written more than 15 years ago. Zaccai said of aesthetics, “It is related totally to our ability to see congruence among our intellectual expectations of an object’s functional characteristics, our emotional need to feel that ethical and social values are met, and our physical need for sensory stimulation.”
• Experience. And yes, experience does matter! Indeed it is cliché that we live/work within an “experience economy,” colored by a now-empty phrase thrown about with slick advertising. The truth is, addressing the human experience has become the central task for designers today in the Deweyan sense [3]—targeting a personal encounter with a technology or system—whereby the individual feels satisfaction and (dare I say it) transcendence… where the momentary becomes momentous!“
(p8)
“The framework itself comprises four core elements: style, performance, utility, and story. These elements must be held in high balance such that none is deficient, to achieve the ideal of the integrative aesthetic experience — or “the beautiful” — in designing digital experiences and beyond.
Style (How does it look and feel?)
Performance (Does it work?)
Utility (Can I use it?)
Story (How does it all connect? What is the purpose?)“
(pp8-9)
