Evaluating aesthetics in design: A phenomenological approach

Design Issues

Volumn 26, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 40-53

  Folkmann, Mads Nygaard ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

DESIGN; ESTHETIC PROPERTY; HANDICRAFT; PATTERN (PLAN);

EID: 72549097861     PISSN: 07479360     EISSN: 15314790     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/desi.2010.26.1.40     Document Type: Article

References (53)

1. To the discussion of emotion in design, see the groundbreaking works by Donald A. Norman, Emotional Design (New York: Basic Books, 2004)
2. Patrick Jordan, Designing Pleasurable Products (London: Taylor & Francis, 2000).
3. In the line from John C. Jones and Peter Slann's seminal 1962 conference on "Systematic and Intuitive Methods in Engineering, Industrial Design, Architecture and Communications" to e.g. Donald A. Schön, The Reflective Practitioner (London: Temple Smith, 1983)
4. Bryan Lawson, How Designers Think (Oxford: Architectural Press, 1980/2005)
5. Nigel Cross, Designerly Ways of Knowing (London: Springer Verlag, 2006).
6. See Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986/2005)
7. Judy Attfield, Wild Things (Oxford: Berg, 2000). The connection in the ideology of "good design" of beauty and moral is itself a classical notion that can be traced back to the Sentimentalist discourse of the eighteenth century.
8. See Klaus Krippendorff: "On the Essential Contexts of Artifacts or on the Proposition that 'Design is Making Sense (of Things)'," in The Idea of Design, R. Buchanan and V. Margolin, eds. (London: MIT Press, 1995), 156-184, and The Semantic Turn. A New Foundation for Design (Boca Raton: Taylor & Francis, 2006).
9. In Ästhetische Theorie, Adorno precisely locates the beginning of the collaboration of art and aesthetics in the philosophy of Schelling: "Ever since Schelling, whose aesthetics is called a philosophy of art, has the aesthetic interest been concentrated on works of art" (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1970), 97.
10. See Cross, Designerly Ways of Knowing (London: Springer Verlag, 2006), 77-93, and Lawson, How Designers Think (Oxford: Architectural Press, 1980/2005) 112-26.
11. As clearly stated by Forty who argues strongly against regarding design as works of art; How Designers Think (Oxford: Architectural Press, 1980/2005), 7.
12. See Morten Kyndrup: "Aesthetics and border lines: 'design' as a liminal case," , 9. (accessed 10/2009).
13. Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
14. Ästhetik des Erscheinens (München: Hanser, 2000)
15. Die Macht des Erscheinens (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2007).
16. Atmosphäre. Essays zur neuen Ästhetik (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1995) Aisthetik. Vorlesungen über Ästhetik als allgemeine Wahrnehmungslehre (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2001).
17. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l'invisible (Éditions Gallimard: Paris, 1964), 170-201.
18. "le corps appartient à l'ordre des choses comme le monde est chair universelle." (Éditions Gallimard: Paris, 1964), 176-79.
19. The all-importance of the subject for the way experience and cognition operate stands at the heart of Immanual Kant's influencal epistemology in Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781/87). Kant's point is, basically, that all experience of any "world" is a matter of subjective cognition according to certain unavoidable modes of perception (time, space) and a specific amount of conceptual categories. The weakness of Kant's epistemology is, however, that it doesn't take into account how the world that we meet can have different kinds of expression, thus generating a certain feed-back on the conditions of experience.
20. Gernot Böhme, Atmosphäre. Essays zur neuen Ästhetik (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1995), 33.
21. Gernot Böhme, Atmosphäre. Essays zur neuen Ästhetik (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1995), 48.
22. Böhme, Aisthetik, 54-56.
23. Böhme, Aisthetik, 57.
24. Böhme, Aisthetik., 121, 159-64. The Danish philosopher Carsten Friberg has written widely and comprehensively on these questions
25. see Æstetiske erfaringer (Copenhagen: Multivers, 2007) and (ed.) Det æstetiskes aktualitet (Copenhagen: Multivers, 2006).
26. See especially the essay "Synästhesien" in Atmosphäre, 85-98.
27. Böhme, Atmosphäre, 35
28. Böhme calls it "aesthetic ecomony," but in my opinion, the sociologically founded concept of experience economy is more powerful. See also Gerhard Schulze, Die Erlebnisgesellschaft: Kultursoziologie der Gegenwart (Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 2005).
29. In the words of Morten Kyndrup, Den æstetiske relation (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2008), 102.
30. I thank Carsten Friberg for making me aware of this point.
31. This is not quite the same as, but does not exclude, the dogma of material culture studies of design as a "meaningmaking process" that "encompasses the materialization of the physical world as a human project of creation"
32. Judy Attfield, Wild Things (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 20. Whereas Attfield's theory is sociologically founded in its focus on "the way people construct and interact with the modern material world through the practice of design and its objectification-the products of that process," where design thus is conceived as "a practice of making meaning material" (Ibid. 12 and 42), my aim is to put emphasis on the implications in a phenomenological context for the meeting between subject and object, thus acknowledging the power of the specificity of the object.
33. For an elaborate introduction, see (with English text) Ida Engholm, Verner Panton (Copenhagen: Aschehoug, 2005).
34. This was, interestingly, also the ambition of the historic functionalism in architecture, e.g. in the ideas of Le Corbusier, with the intention of, through the build environment, creating new conditions for living.
35. Martin Seel, Die Macht des Erscheinens (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2007), 13.
36. Martin Seel, Die Macht des Erscheinens (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2007), 14. The same critique that can be raised against Böhme for only being interested in how something appears not what specifically also applies to Seel.
37. Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l'invisible, 193.
38. Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l'invisible, 194.
39. Thus, this way of conceptualizing meaning differs from Krippendorff's semantic theory, which doesn't explore the actual kind of expression of the meaning in depth.
40. C.f. a whole line of aesthetic theory on German ground: from Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie to Christoph Menke, Die Souveränität der Kunst (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1991), Rüdiger Bubner, Ästhetische Erfahrung (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1989), Karl-Heinz Bohrer, Die Grenzen des Ästhetischen (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1998), and Joachin Küpper & Christoph Menke (eds.), Dimensionen ästhetischer Erfahrung (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2003).
41. See Roman Jakobson's seminal article: "Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics" In Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), 350-77.
42. Morten Kyndrup, Den æstetiske relation, 102. With a reluctance to speak of aesthetics in design, Attfield instead talks of "things with attitude" as a category of objects inherent of a selfawareness for envisaging change.
43. See to this Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture & Postmodernism (London: Sage, 1991).
44. Böhme, for instance.
45. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 204.
46. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 258f.
47. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 122.
48. Martin Seel, Ästhetik des Erscheinens (München: Hanser, 2000), 184.
49. Seel, Die Macht des Erscheinens, 38.
50. As in James J. Gibson's concept of affordance, that is, the constrained possibilities for specific actions inherent in an environment or an object
51. see "The Theory of Affordances," in Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing, eds. Robert Shaw and John Bransford, (New Jersey: Hillsdale, 1977). This notion has been especially productive, for e.g., HCI research, and leaves its traces in Donald A. Norman's The Design of Everyday Things (New York: Basic Books, 2002) where it is used to investigate the "perceived and actual properties" of a thing that "determine just how the thing could possibly be used," 9.
52. For a further description (in Danish), see Mads Nygaard Folkmann, Louise Campbell (Copenhagen: Aschehoug, 2007).
53. See to this concept Donald A. Norman's functionalist credo in The Design of Everyday Things: "Natural mapping, by which I mean taking advantage of physical analogies and cultural standards, leads to immediate understanding," 23.