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
