What if an aesthetics specific to design was to be developed?
The word “aesthetic” when used in a design context is usually loosely understood to be a synonym for “beauty” or “styling.”
If an aesthetics specific to design was to be developed, it would need to avoid being split into, first, a theory of beautiful objects and, second, a critique of aesthetic judgment, but that process has yet to begin. It would also have to be open to an aesthetic theory that abides by that, which reveals itself to be aesthetic in perception and experience.
Yet, because a specifically formulated design aesthetic is lacking, the term is usually used in its colloquial sense in the context of design. That is to say: in advertising, photography exeter, marketing, branding, and even elementary design criticism, aesthetics is a loose synonym for “beautiful,” “tasteful,” or “inoffensive.” Many who use the term “aesthetics” actually mean “styling,” or to identify what are assessed as the beautiful or ugly features of a certain object.
The word “aesthetics” also implies an important aspect of the product’s effect in relation to its material, social, political, ecological, and symbolic contexts. The two aspects of aesthetics mentioned above are embedded in the historical development of the term. In the eighteenth century, there was a semantic shift from aesthesis to aesthetic, from sense perception in general to a focus on the arts in particular.
The term “aesthetics” has become a catchphrase in almost every area of life since postmodernism. The radical pluralism that followed the reassessment of the modernist movement traced diverse paths leading out of Modernism, with many subsequent political, social, technical, and aesthetic upheavals. In the process, the standard definitions (that had prevailed until the 1970s) of aesthetics as an objective discipline and a branch of philosophy themselves changed.
It became essential to reformulate the semantics of the word because of significant changes in the status of differing forms of knowledge, ways of life, and behavioral patterns. Today, aesthetics appears in various contexts with different meanings and emphases; even the plurality and scope of the word has become the subject of prolonged debate. Nevertheless, the most evident thing now about aesthetics is that there is no longer anything self-evident about it.
The recent revisions that attempt to reevaluate the established term are motivated by a focus on removing boundaries: first, by recalling the original Greek word aisthesis meaning perception through the senses, and second, by expanding the scope of aesthetics beyond the arts to include fields like design.
And, thus, the word “aesthetics” gradually came to denote a branch of philosophy that focused on what set the beautiful apart, why we had such a category, and on the arts in general. As a result, products of the arts in European and non-European history, along with their associated theories, became aesthetic objects.
Philosophy rejected the notion of aesthetics as a doctrine of sense perception because knowledge derived from the senses was, in the wake of the Enlightenment, largely considered contrary to rational knowledge, which was based on strict terms and definitions.
Today, philosophy defines aesthetics as either a theory of sensory perception or a philosophical or sociological theory of art. Put into simple terms, “aesthetics” deals with the question of whether (and, if so, in what manner) words such as “beautiful” or “ugly” can be applied to specific objects, or whether it is perhaps the sum of our personal and social idiosyncrasies that interprets something as beautiful or ugly.
The aesthetic value of an object is determined either by terms and definitions, or its particular sensory quality and what it represents in conjunction with the object’s system of symbols. “Aesthetic difference” implies the specific features of an object that qualify as aesthetic. It has also been argued that aesthetics is intrinsic to an object.
Empirical sciences such as experimental psychology disagree with this theory, maintaining that aesthetics is the attempt to understand the criteria that humans use to evaluate things as either beautiful or ugly even those that are not a product of the arts. Words such as “beauty,” however, were being used long before aesthetics was formulated into a philosophy. Homer, for example, who saw artistic creation as a productive, skilled work of God, spoke of beauty and harmony.
Heraclitus defined beauty as the tangible, material quality of the real, whereas art, by copying nature, would be just the opposite; and in the Pythagoreans’ cosmological and aesthetic philosophy, the theory of numbers and proportions plays a crucial role in beauty and harmony. Socrates believed that the beautiful and the good coincide, but that stance caused a stir in design, especially after the Second World War, in debates over the good design of everyday objects.
Yet, even if we may have moved beyond the Socratic notion of design, it is still very relevant in current discussions pertaining to the ecological principles of designing industrial manufacturing processes, sustainable sources of energy, and recyclable materials. Plato, by contrast, although he adhered to the notion of the subjective reality of the human senses, attributed an extrasensory character to beauty, which is why this, as an idea, applies to human understanding or the capacity to reflect.
Yet if things are merely a reflection of ideas, then design, as craft and art, merely emulates the reflection of things. Consequently, Plato was critical of the contribution made by art or craft to ideas. Any form of conceptual art, from Duchamp to Kosuth, is hence a type of Platonism.
Aristotle, who criticized Plato’s notion of aesthetics and developed his own aesthetic views on the basis of the art of his time, also tried to comprehend the relationship between the good and the beautiful.
His attempt to define the dialectics of essence and appearance and their relationship to the beauty of artifice has been fundamental to the history of aesthetics.
Another of his proposals turned out to be even more influential with regard to the aesthetics of the made in design. Aristotle spoke of art serving to stimulate and purify certain emotions (catharsis), and it is precisely this aspect of aesthetics that has been adopted by marketing and branding.
For Aristotle, this was substantiated particularly by the fact that artistic endeavors were supposed to be an acting out of alternatives. If art shows how things could be, rather than being bound to a factual and truthful version of reality, then this notion of aesthetics, even in its orientation toward the possible and exemplary, can be quite relevant to an analysis of design as process.
On the one hand, evaluating an object as beautiful and therefore aesthetic has always been associated with craft skills and with the distinctive qualities that characterize those things produced with such skills. Hence, a notion of aesthetics that considers beauty to be a property of things attached to things, as it were is not only closely related to design; it also prevents a reorientation of aesthetic thought to base it on the design process, since the product only exists when the process is completed.
On the other hand, the aspect of aesthetics that believes products convey specific material, intellectual, and social qualities is already embedded in the history of aesthetics as a discipline.
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten reestablished aesthetics as an independent philosophical discipline in the mid-eighteenth century. Even though the new discipline would compete for a long time with poetics and rhetoric, aesthetics quickly