work leverages clear, simple, concrete vocabulary for use with any nondesign peers.

However, there is one more thing...it is not enough to simply walk through the four elements of an integrative experience and check them off a list for a team checkpoint review. This framework is not meant to be a quick formula or recipe, fostering standardized results at every turn of the handle; nor should that expectation ever be made, particularly by nondesign teammates. Designers know deep down that powerful elements of imagination, empathy, and serendipity play tremendous roles in discovering and enabling that aesthetic experience, potentially a breakthrough product that reshapes the industry (like the Wii, Prius, Dyson, etc). To create the beautiful must involve qualities of inspiration and transcendence that speak to aspirational values held by us as human beings (not mere users or consumers), as we seek to extend and discover something that calls out to an “experience of being fully alive” (as Joseph Campbell alludes to). For only then is the beautiful in design truly created!

September + October 2008

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without the fee, provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on services or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. © ACM 1072-5220/08/0900 $5.00

interactions

pull off all four elements at a very high level. Those that do can rightly be described as “ harmonies”: Here are some notable examples:

Aesthetic Harmonies

• Apple iPhone + i Tunes + Mac OS X

• Toyota Prius, Dyson DC- 11, OXO kitchenware

• XBOX 360 + Live Marketplace

• Adobe Lightroom UI + digital SLR workflow

• Virgin America Web signup + flight experience

Shared qualities: High levels of story, style, utility, and performance all consonant with each other, interrelated and contributing to a memorable, positive quality of engagement that is rich and pleasurable. There is delight, a sense of flow and transparency of the interface, satisfaction, and joy of use. Also a strong brand connection and delivery of the brand’s promise.

Using this framework we can identify easily/quickly the problems underlying aesthetic breakdowns. Most often it’s because of a deficiency in one of the four elements. More than simply a feeling, we can point to story or style or performance or utility as the break points. Thus, the framework provides a ground for designers’ arguments and anchors interdisciplinary debates to specific points, avoiding the opinionated and personally defensive. The framework becomes a vital tool for critical analysis comparing/contrasting design solutions. One could also append relative metrics (a Likert scale of sorts) to each element to internally gauge their success at product-development checkpoints before commit dates.

Ultimately, the goal of this

framework is to engage with peers in a productive dialogue, thus enrolling the team into the designer’s pursuit of beauty, recast now as an “aesthetic experience.” Indeed, beauty in this regard sneakily becomes a shared collaborative goal, rather than a resented commandment imposed by some outside design expert. This framework is grounded in clear, simple terms suitable for a nondesign audience but still embodies those values held dear by experience designers. Managers and engineers “get” what style, performance, and utility mean. Product managers argue over “what’s the story” for a feature when preparing requirements. Indeed each element maps quite well to a specific product team owner: Style is typically design, performance is engineering and QA, utility is human factors/usability with design (and QA as well), and story is generally marketing/ brand strategy. This way there is truly group ownership of the overall goal with specific people/ duties/roles tied to each element, not just random abstract concepts as mere talking points. The integrative aesthetic experience repositions beaut y for designing high-quality engagements with the digital and beyond, taking into account a complete humanistic outlook: sensual style, functional performance, human utility, and a complementary story of use or purpose that drives the overall experience. It is a potent tool for staging vital conversations about what matters most to designers, and thus to the overall product development team as a shared goal for achieving the beautiful in design. The frame-

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Uday Gajendar is a UI
designer based in Silicon
Valley. His work has
spanned enterprise soft-
ware, creative tools, Web
applications, and phone devices at a range
of companies—Oracle, Adobe, Cisco, and
Involution, a boutique design studio.
Holding degrees in both interaction design
(Carnegie Mellon) and industrial design
(Michigan), Uday advances the field
with frequent talks and papers about
designing attractive, intuitive digital prod-
ucts. You can read his latest thoughts at
www.ghostinthepixel.com.