Experiential Aesthetics:
A Framework for
Beautiful Experience
Uday Gajendar

Cisco Systems | [e-mail]

[ 1] Here “consumer” refers to anyone who uses a product or service, regardless of industry. Thus, a user of e-business soft ware is a consumer, just like the user of a home camera. Each person is consuming a technology to perform a task.

September + October 2008

[ 2] We don’t actually design experiences. We design only the contexts, interfaces and artifacts that might lead to a positive experience. Experiences are deeply personal and self-generated, per the individual’s own will and attitude. Designers are merely the arbiters of a potentially good user experience.

Why have a framework for understanding beauty? Isn’t beauty simply obvious, like the infamous Supreme Court quip about pornography—“You know it when you see it?” Perhaps for natural forms of beauty— flowers, landscapes, animals, human bodies—subjective taste may suffice for coffee-table pundits and aesthetic philosophers alike. But in the high-stakes world of product development, where delicately balancing profit motive with consumer value is paramount, more than a mere appreciation for beauty is needed. One must actively create and deliver “the beautiful” when designing “the artificial”—objects for popular consumption. That requires multidisciplinary cooperation to succeed. Therefore, a coherent model identifying specific, tangible elements of a beautiful experience will enable a designer to argue effectively with nondesign peers leery of poetic speak. The result is an informed team able to achieve “the beautiful” via compelling experiences for consumers [ 1].

interactions

The Noble Pursuit As designers we espouse a user-oriented philosophy toward improving technologies that support people in their daily tasks.

It is a decidedly humanistic outlook, guiding the conception and creation of products to be useful, usable, and desirable. If we probe further, however, 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.” This statement aptly acknowledges the primacy of problem solving, but it also notes the role of beauty as a desired outcome. Beauty is admittedly tricky to describe, given commonplace notions. For now, I use the word as an imperfect shorthand to encompass multiple concepts as artfully phrased by Paul Rand: “to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade,” thus resulting in something that elicits a deeply positive feeling. This emphasizes the sublime yet humane quality that transcends mere tactical wizardry of material shapes and styles.

From Posters to Toasters...

Yet the dominant evidence for the designer’s pursuit of beauty is found in the material world of images and objects that surround us, from home to office and beyond.

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, such as enjoying a story or buying a brand of toothpaste. You can find this at the movies: “Gattaca’s” title sequence evocatively suggests a cinematic meditation on a genetically enhanced future. Or at a bookstore: A recently designed reissue of the classic renegade text, The Communist Manifesto, exudes hipness with a luscious red cover and digital typesetting (perhaps betraying its proletariat origins!). Edward Tufte’s intimately detailed charts of quantitative stats convey deeply absorbing narratives of data, beyond a dreary spreadsheet or (gasp) PowerPoint show. Finally, John Maeda’s computational artistry lends elegance and grace to Shiseido’s advertising and marketing materials.