While industrial designers have traditionally advocated aesthetics in their work, with
evocative forms and materials, recent advances in design philosophy about “user
experience” suggest a deeper analysis. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to explore beauty
as an experiential aesthetic value, dependent upon user-product interactions. The goal is to
offer designers a valuable tool: a systematic, extensible model for describing beauty for
design, with powerful insights drawn from other disciplines, including psychology,
philosophy, computer science, and architecture.
This paper strives to understand the concept of beauty as a value of human-product
grounded in daily experience. Beauty is typically associated with aesthetics and nature, but
can the experience of an industrial product, like a computer mouse or a CD player or a
faucet, be characterized as beautiful? What does beauty mean for the high tech component?
Beauty becomes a vital issue as electronic, multifunctional products rapidly shape our
environment of human experience. They subsequently influence how people live, work, and
play—in short, personal lifestyles. To understand how to connect analog aesthetics with
consumer design products, we first consider the nature of experience, which may depend
upon the dynamic relation of three elements: attention, attraction, and beauty. We then
examine philosophical interpretations of aesthetic experience, using Ferdinand de
Saussure’s Semiotics, Gelernter’s Machine Beauty, Dewey’s Lifestyle Design and Gropius’
Spiritual/Cultural Harmony. Using familiar objects like the Hadid’s Future Faucet Design,
and Starck’s optical mouse, we bridge theory with application and identify four kinds of
beauty in action: Semiotics, Machine Beauty, Lifestyle Design and Spiritual/Cultural
Harmony. Thus, we learn that beauty, as it pertains to industrial design, transcends mere
surface ornament to become an emergent value of human-product that operates in
experience through human attention and emotional attraction.
DRS 2012 Bangkok
