Integrative Aesthetic Experience

Utility

Performance

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) transcen-dence… where the momentary becomes momentous!

[ 3] John De wey may have been the world’s first “user experience strategist” when he published Art as Experience in 1934; in it he defined the qualities of a complete experience and its connection to human emotion, formal expression, and the social aspect of being human. His ideas influenced Moholy-Nagy of Chicago’s Institute of Design, and the design school at Carnegie Mellon University, among others.

September + October 2008

[ 4] Keen readers will see the strong parallel bet ween this framework and the core elements of a rhetorical argument, dra wn from classical theory originally developed by Aristotle and more recently elaborated upon separately by Wayne Booth and Richard Buchanan.

of “others” results from the current Cambrian-like explosion of forms, situations, and technologies impacting the design profession. There is an emerging spectrum of designed outcomes, from the material to the immaterial, with increasing complexity and dimensionality. From 2-D (graphics), 3-D (objects), 4-D (software, networks), n-dimen-sional (services, systems, environments, cultures), each new type of “other” adds to the overall set of human interaction/ communication problems, with an increasingly panicked (hope or fear?) realization that “design” thought and action can apply to each of them!

Which brings us back to the article’s theme: How does this brave new world affect the modern designer’s pursuit of beauty? What is the role and value of beauty anymore if it’s all becoming immaterial, transient, and mediated by “the digital”? Is beauty, in effect, dead?

interactions

Beauty Redefined as Aesthetic Experience 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 “inte-

grative 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

The Framework Revealed

Stepping back for a moment, this thinking suggests a profoundly humanistic perspective on beauty, with its motives centered on human experience. But the engineer and manager are eager to build a shippable product, with clear-cut instructions. So, it’s now time for a profoundly pragmatic deconstruction of what this all means for real-world product development. The framework itself comprises four core elements: style, performance, utility, and story (see Figure 1). 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. What follows is a brief explanation of each concept, supported by specific examples [ 4].

1. Style (How does it look and feel?) The sensual “voice” expressing product brand and quality, commensurate with business goals and user expectations. High style is valued more and more by consumers for emotive reasons, per Virginia Postrel’s pop-cultural examination of an “aesthetic imperative” arising, whereby people increasingly expect Ikea, Target, or Apple levels of style nowadays as the norm. And as professors