Aesthetics of Interaction (MPhil Research)

Taken from: Criticism As An Approach To Interface Aesthetics.
BERTELSEN, O. W. and POLD, S. (2004) Criticism As An Approach To Interface Aesthetics. In Proceedings of the Third Nordic Conference on Human-Computer interaction. Tampere, Finland, October 23 – 27, 2004. NordiCHI ’04, vol. 82. ACM, New York, pp 23-32.

“today’s dominating perspectives on interactive artefacts focus almost only on technical and cognitive aspects, and consequently the field needs to take a cultural and aesthetic level of analysis into account in order to be able to address issues like design for unanticipated use or design of cultural interfaces. With the popularity of the PC and the web the interactive artefacts have spread from being efficient, functional tools at the workplace, to become a medium for cultural activity. Today, interactive artefacts are important media for producing, consuming and interacting with cultural data, e.g. on the web, or in computer games. Furthermore, it is also a cultural medium in its own terms, in the sense that interacting with interactive artefacts is an increasingly important cultural activity, (…) Interactive artefacts entered the cultural sphere long ago – this trend is accentuated by the current developments towards pervasive and ubiquitous computing.” (p23)

“Apart from the media aesthetic branch of aesthetic theory, the aesthetics we propose is based on digital aesthetics. Theories of digital aesthetics have evolved within the field of aesthetic theory, especially since the PC was popularized, drawing on modern aesthetic theories from e.g. Barthes, McLuhan and Benjamin. Especially the developments of Benjamin focus on how digital art and aesthetics explore and develop a critical insight into the media and mediated perception, and how a new formal language is developing.” (p24)

Taken from: Aesthetics of Mundane Interactions.
VYAS, D.M. (2008) Aesthetics of Mundane Interactions. In: Dagstuhl Seminar Proceedings 08292, 13-16 July 2008, Dagstuhl, Germany.

“Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics suggests that aesthetics of an experience cannot be seen as a collection of isolated and separate entities. It is a ‘lived’ reality and a coherent whole that is continuous and irreducible. Contradicting with the analytical approaches, pragmatist aesthetics suggests that by separating an aesthetic experience, our understanding of an ‘experience as a whole’ is distorted and impoverished. We used a conceptual framework to explore aesthetics of mundane social interactions of staff-members in an academic work environment. The main purpose to do this was to explore and design possible technological solutions that can be sensitive to the social environment and everyday practices of staff-members. We used observations, contextual interviews and cultural probe methods to elicit staff members experiences in their everyday lives.” (p#)

Taken from: Interaction Criticism And Aesthetics.
BARDZELL, J. (2009) Interaction Criticism And Aesthetics. In Proceedings of the 27th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, MA, USA, April 04 – 09, 2009). ACM, New York, pp2357-2366.

“The concepts and vocabulary of aesthetics and critical theory have much to offer HCI, because they emphasize qualities and issues that HCI is obviously concerned with in interaction: experience, symbolic density and cohesion, beauty, enlightenment, social justice, dialogism, identity and the self, form and meaning, taste and judgment, ideological encodings, interpretation/hermeneutics, and signifying structures, among many others.” (p2357)

“The goal of this paper is specifically to offer an introduction, for interaction designers, to aesthetic and critical theory as it applies to interaction.” (p2357)

“Thus, appropriating any one technique, say, deep focus, from the rest of this context would rob it of much of its analytic force, since that technique is associated with and made meaningful by a series of films, a coherent theory of film, and an underlying theory of epistemology and ethics. Yet the reductive approaches of experimental science work best precisely when they can isolate on a single feature, control for it, and conduct a series of tests on it. This is not to suggest that there is no solution to this conflict, but merely to acknowledge that the conflict merits reflective action.” (p2358)

“The difficulty is not a mere matter of implementation. Rather, the philosophical underpinnings of artistic activity and scientific visualization are not obviously compatible.” (p2358)

“One way this tendency materializes is in the abundant frameworks offered in the field, which reduce culture and cultural theory to bullet lists. These guidelines may have a legitimate place in practice, and in many cases, they are presented as such. The problem is only when they are mistaken for a coherent theory and cited as authoritative resources on aesthetics, when they in fact make no such claim. An example of this is [A]’s 8-part framework for enabling designers to evaluate interface aesthetics. This framework is explicitly offered as a practitioner’s guidelines, and it was tested and evaluated with graduate students and, on those terms, deemed successful. Considered philosophically, as a theory, the framework is incoherent, in that it integrates ideas from competing theories without any consideration that they seem to contradict each other.” (p2358)
(A) Bertselsen, O. & Pold, S. Criticism as an approach to interface aesthetics. Proc. of NordiCHI’04, ACM Press (2004), 23-32.

“the pattern is that inasmuch as aesthetics and critical theory appear in HCI, they tend to do so in pragmatic ways to solve particular problems. Harder to find (though by no means absent, e.g., [A]) is systematic, rigorous, expert integration aesthetic/critical traditions and HCI. A major reason for this state of affairs is that many of the people who are bringing aesthetics and critical theory into HCI have backgrounds in the sciences, including psychology, HCI, computer science, and so forth. Though they are serious scholars pursuing their work in earnest, they are not philosophers of art or critical theorists. On the flip side, experts of aesthetics and critical theory, to the extent that they even talk about computer technology at all, tend to do so in the context of new media (examples include [B,C,D,E]. They engage less with interaction design as a discipline, and so their work tends to have little influence in HCI. If culture is incidental to HCI, then this situation, in which aesthetics/critical theory and HCI are not quite on the same page, is acceptable. But if we are to accept that HCI is a major cultural force in its own right, and if we are serious about experience design, then the lack of a pool of philosophically reasonable, coherent theories of interaction aesthetics and interaction criticism is a problem that needs to be addressed.” (pp2358-2359)
(A) Coyne, R. Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age: From Method to Metaphor. The MIT Press (1997).
(B) Manovich, L. The Language of New Media. MIT Press (2001).
(C) Bolter, J, & Grusin, R. Remediation. MIT Press (1999).
(D) Landow, G. Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. The Johns Hopkins UP (1997).
(E) Hanks, K., Odom, W., Roedl, D. and Blevis, E. Sustainable millennials: Attitudes towards sustainability and the material effects of interactive technologies. Proc. of CHI’08, ACM Press (2008), 333-342.

“Richard Shusterman’s Pragmatist Aesthetics [A] builds on the analytic tradition using the pragmatism of Dewey and Rorty to propose an experience centered
aesthetics.” (p2359)
(A) Shusterman, R. Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (2000).

“One might contrast such a notion of aesthetics with the understanding of aesthetics implicit in, for example, Nielsen’s heuristics [A], which is based on a notion that the aesthetics of interaction merely inhere in the decorative elements that adorn an interface. Neilsen’s position is rejected in a recent Interactions article [B] as superficial. Yet in the same article, the author offers in its place a notion of aesthetics driven by four qualities, two of which are “utility” and “performance.” These qualities bear a non-trivial resemblance the traditional values of HCI and come across more as commonsense than as a philosophically justifiable framework. Whether this new notion is useful for practitioners is beside the point; it is itself a debatable philosophical position that in aesthetics would be subjected to rigorous scrutiny.” (p2359)
(A) Nielsen, J. Ten usability heuristics. Online: http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html
(B) Gajendar, U. Experiential aesthetics: A framework for beautiful experience. Interactions xv 5, ACM Press (2008), 6-10.

“Cultural criticism is not primarily about taste, or identifying which are good books or movies and which are bad ones. Instead, criticism is typically aligned with continental philosophy, the main rival of analytic philosophy described earlier under aesthetics. Continental philosophy is situated in the radical skepticism of Nietzsche and continues in the twentieth century through the phenomenology of Heidegger; existentialism and Sartres; poststructuralism, Foucault, and Derrida; several generations of feminism from de Beauvoir to Paglia; and the postmodernism of Lyotard and Baudrillard, among others.” (p2360)

“Taken out of context, critical concepts lose much of their original explanatory power, and when they are attached to otherwise rationalistic approaches, they can be even further diminished, impoverished, and trivialized.” (p2360)

“One of them is a rejection of the notion that art and culture “is all subjective,” which is a counterproductive cop-out. Both aesthetics and critical theory are oriented to development of practices of expert judgment, specifically to make possible judgments about art and culture. To be sure, their notions of judgment—and its evaluation—differ. In analytic aesthetics, judgment is grounded in relentless logical reasoning. In critical theory, judgment is cultivated through the deconstruction of knowledge as it appears in—and produces—culture.” (p2360)

“Yet judgment is still treated with skepticism by many in HCI, who do not understand how it differs from mere opinion. Expert judgment differs from opinion inasmuch as it engages in disciplines of judgment, such as aesthetics and critical theory, that offer the intellectual tools to develop rational arguments about cultural phenomena that are difficult or impossible to measure or evaluate scientifically.” (p2361)

“Cultural theory, in contrast, might be fairly described as embodying complex and insoluble philosophical positions, which entail (ontological) assumptions about the nature of reality, epistemological possibilities and constraints, methodological strategies, and ethical stances all at once.” (p2361)

“These theories are not verifiable or predictive in the same way that a theory about the behavior of molecules is. Rather, they are intellectual tools to support the interpretative and activist activities of the critic.” (p2361)

“Does interaction belong in the list of cultural phenomena, alongside film, novels, operas, and TV, or put another way, is interaction the kind of thing that a cultural studies approach could critique? From the standpoint of cultural criticism, the answer is obviously yes. From the standpoint of HCI, which is oriented toward the design and evaluation of real-world interaction design as opposed to cultural critique for refined judgment or broader social activism, the answer is perhaps more nuanced. Two issues are at stake: one is the comparability of interaction to other cultural forms, and the other is the orientation not towards social activism, but rather towards immediate, concrete, and situated interaction design problems.” (p2361)

“As we interact with interaction designs, we create its sequences, its juxtapositions, its meaning and significance. Imagining interaction design artifacts as separate from users, and vice-versa, is certainly possible, but in HCI, we try to blur the distinction and have done so for a long time. Norman’s [A] framework, which explicates the relationships among the design model, the system image, and the user model is oriented toward harmonizing, not differentiating among, the three. HCI has developed techniques to facilitate this harmonization by elaborating conceptual models of systems, predictive performance models (e.g., GOMS), user mental models, and human cognitive models and conscientiously designing systems to be compatible with all of the above.” (pp2361-2362)
(A) Norman, D. The Design of Everyday Things. Basic Books, New York (1988).

“critical approaches are about exposing and exploring alternative assumptions about the key relationships in our field—the user, the design, interaction, the business or home context, and quality of life now and in the future.” (p2362)

“Combining the past two points, the persuasive/rhetorical artifact argument suggests that an inanimate object—a design— is conditioning everyday, practical living. This claim has obvious ethical implications, which both [A] and [B] explicitly consider. Note that ethics is all but irrelevant if a design is just a tool, because ethical agency is situated squarely in the user. But if designs persuade people, or reshape everyday life, they can in that limited sense be understood to exercise agency and have an ethical dimension.” (p2364)
(A) Fogg, B. J. Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (2003).
(B) Buchanon, R. Declaration by design: Rhetoric, argument, and demonstration in design practice. In Margolin, V. (ed.). Design Discourse: History, Theory, Criticism. (1989).

“To ensure the groundedness and relevance of designerly speculation, we need the union of, not competition of, scientific and critical ways of knowing. Our problem space—humancomputer interaction—is an elusive object of study. We cannot see it directly, even less so during the design conceptualization phases. But empirical science, including all forms of user research, can help us understand the phenomenology of interaction, an argument that the field appears to have increasingly accepted after [A]. In a complementary way, critical approaches help us think deeply about how we as designers, and how users as users, construct knowledge about artifacts and users, which stimulates innovation and helps HCI engage its cultural participation with professionalism and intellectual integrity.” (pp2364-2365)
(A) Winograd, T. and Flores, W. Understanding Computers and Cognition. Addison-Wesley, Norwood, NJ. (1986)

“• Interaction design can develop theory. HCI need not passively accept what has already been developed in critical theory. Interaction design is arguably the dominant cultural medium today, and we can innovate on critical theory, to make it work better for our community’s professional and intellectual needs, from new design frameworks to educational vocabularies for design educators and professional mentors.
• Interaction criticism can expose the consequences of design. Researchers can critique interaction designs with the hope of exposing unintended consequences and enabling the community to design more rationally. Ontological design, as it evolved into sustainable design, is an example in which critical activity contributed to the emergence of an important new domain of HCI research and practice.” (p2365)

Taken from: Understanding Experience In Interactive Systems.
FORLIZZI, J. and BATTARBEE, K. (2004) Understanding Experience In Interactive Systems. In Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Designing interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods, and Techniques (Cambridge, MA, USA, August 01 – 04, 2004). ACM, New York, pp261-268.

“Interaction-centered models explore the role that products serve in bridging the gap between designer and user. Here, too, we see approaches from a number of disciplines. For example, the philosopher John Dewey has been instrumental in helping designers understand the qualitative and definitive aspects of experience [A,B]. Essentially experience is a totality, engaging self in relationship with object in a situation. Researchers and practitioners in a variety of disciplines have built on the foundations of Dewey’s theory to create knowledge about how people engage with products and the world. Wright et al. [C] discuss experience from a design perspective as consisting of four threads: compositional, sensory, emotional and spatio-temporal. The threads contribute to actions (such as anticipating and recounting) that create meaning. Margolin, a design historian, provides four dimensions that clarify how people interact with designed products — categorizing operational, inventive, aesthetic, and social uses [D]. Pine and Gilmore differentiate between passive and active experiences, and experiences that are immersive as opposed to those that are absorbing [E]. Overbeeke and Wensveen focus on the aesthetics of interaction and the ways in which form and behavior support feedforward and feedback. Information in interfaces and action are coupled in six ways: time, location, direction, modality, dynamics and expression [F].“ (p262)
(A) Desmet, P. Designing Emotion. Doctoral thesis, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands, 2002.
(B) Dewey, J. Art as Experience. New York: Perigee Books (reprint), 1980.
(C) Wright, P., McCarthy, J., and Meekison, L. Making Sense of Experience. (2003) In: (Blythe, M.A., Overbeeke, K., Monk, A.F. and Wright, P.C. Eds.) Funology: From Usability to Enjoyment. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 43-53.
(D) Mäkelä, A., Giller, V., Tsheligi, M., & Sefelin, R. Joking, storytelling, artsharing, expressing affection: A field trial of how children and their social network communicate with digital images in leisure time. Proceedings of the CHI00 Conference (2000), 548-555.
(E) Pine, B.J. II & Gilmore, J.H. Welcome to the Experience Economy, Harvard Business Review, July-August 1998, 97.
(F) Overbeeke C.J. & Wensveen, S.A.G. Reflection on pleasure: From perception to experience, from affordances to irresistibles. In: Proceedings of the DPPI03 Conference, ACM (2003), 92-97.

“Experience is how we constantly assess our goals relative to the people, products, and environments that surround us at any given time. (…) An experience is more coalesced, something that could be articulated or named. This type of experience may be characterized by a number of product interactions and emotions, but is schematized with a particular character in one’s memory and a sense of completion. An experience has a beginning and an end, and often inspires emotional and behavioral changes in the experiencer. ” (p263)

“Co-experience is about user experience in social contexts. Co-experience takes place as experiences are created together, or shared with others. (…) Social situations greatly influence co-experience. (…) Co-experience reveals how the experiences an individual has and the interpretations that are made of them are influenced by the physical or virtual presence of others. (…) Interactive technology systems can play a large role in supporting co-experience, through providing mediated communication channels and the possibility to create, edit, share and view content with others.” (p263)

“From a psychological standpoint, emotion has three basic functions: to shape our plans and intentions, to organize the procedures related to the plans, and to evaluate outcomes [A]. From a design standpoint, emotion shapes the gap that exists between people and products in the world. Emotion affects how we plan to interact with products, how we actually interact with products, and the perceptions and outcomes that surround those interactions. Emotion serves as a resource for understanding and communicating about what we experience.” (p264)
(A) Carlson, R. Experienced Cognition. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997.

“Next, to achieve one’s goal, emotion coordinates our activity with products and interfaces in the environment. The affordances of products give us clues about how to support our activity. The psychologist J.J. Gibson originated these ideas in his theory of affordances [A]. Some have associated the concept of affordances with product usability, but affordances can also be seen as the way people undertake cognition and action in the world to make meaning. If products make suitable activities available and easy at a given time, pleasure and positive product interactions result. If our plans and resulting activities are interrupted, negative emotion results, often startling us to devise a new plan. Finally, emotion helps us to evaluate our outcomes and experiences in interacting with products. If the outcome is satisfactory, a sense of accomplishment results, and effort is reduced or a new goal is created. This type of outcome supports fluent experience; it has also been described as the flow state [B].” (p264)
(A) Gibson, J.J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979.
(B) Csikszentimihalyi, M. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper, 1990.

“we offer an understanding of the experiences of the individual and co-experience as a sensitizing concept to help in interpreting meaning from a social interaction perspective. This process needs to be visual, empathic, and emotionally driven to be ultimately successful in supporting inspiration and gaining insights into user experience.” (p267)

Taken from: A Critical Evaluation Of Literature On Visual Aesthetics For The Web
HOFFMANN, R. AND KRAUSS, K. (2004) A Critical Evaluation Of Literature On Visual Aesthetics For The Web. In Proceedings of the 2004 Annual Research Conference of the South African institute of Computer Scientists and information Technologists on IT Research in Developing Countries (Stellenbosch, Western Cape, South Africa, October 04 – 06, 2004). G. MARSDEN, P. KOTZE, and A. ADESINA-OJO, Eds. SAICSIT, vol. 75. South African Institute for Computer Scientists and Information Technologists, pp205-209.

“Visual aesthetics, and the process of applying it, involves selecting elements and techniques that are most appropriate for shaping a message or content to make it as effective as possible [A]. Applied visual aesthetics is about effective communication. Through the use of elements of visual aesthetics the perceptions of the viewer are manipulated. The aim of visual aesthetics is to induce the user to unknowingly, unconsciously, and unsuspectingly choose to become involved in the message and the website of concern [B].” (p205)
(A) ZETTL, H., 1999. Sight, Sound, Motion: Applied Media Aesthetics. Wadsworth Publishing Company, USA.
(B) KRAUSS, K., 2004. Visual aesthetics and its effect on communication intent: a theoretical study and website evaluation. Proceedings of the Southern African Computer Lecturers Association (SACLA).

“In a study on visual aesthetics and its impact on human perception, Krauss [A] suggested that empirical research with an interpretivist approach is the way to go. “Empirical research with an interpretivist approach draws on experience or primary evidence in order to understand a phenomenon. It basically means to learn from experience rather than from making conclusions based on averages ” [A]. We will therefore refer to the work of Zettl [B] frequently, since it an excellent example of how visual aesthetics has been successfully studied and applied in the area of Television and film production.” (p206)
(A) KRAUSS, K., 2004. Visual aesthetics and its effect on communication intent: a theoretical study and website evaluation. Proceedings of the Southern African Computer Lecturers Association (SACLA).
(B) ZETTL, H., 1999. Sight, Sound, Motion: Applied Media Aesthetics. Wadsworth Publishing Company, USA.

“The elements of visual aesthetics are interdependent and should be studied accordingly (the total is greater than the sum of its parts). Hence, a quantitative research approach is not the way to investigate visual aesthetics. Arnheim [1992, as cited by A] states that it is important to perceive whole objects as meaningful forms rather than isolated elements. Arnheim [1988, cited by A] further argues that dynamic forces, rather than “things” or isolated elements, determine an aesthetic experience.” (p207)
(A) TRACTINSKY, N., AND LAVIE, T., 2003. Assessing dimensions of perceived visual aesthetics of websites. Ben Gurion University of the Negev
http://burdacenter.bgu.ac.il/publications/finalReports1999-2000/TractinskyLavie.pdf [Accessed March 29th, 2004].

Taken from: The Aesthetics Of Touch In Interaction Design
MOTAMEDI, N. (2007) The Aesthetics Of Touch In Interaction Design. In Proceedings of the 2007 Conference on Designing Pleasurable Products and interfaces (Helsinki, Finland, August 22 – 25, 2007). ACM, New York, pp 455-460.

“In philosophy, this distinction is between an analytic approach to aesthetics and a pragmatist. The emerging domain of ‘Aesthetics of Interaction’ has been aligned with pragmatism because it’s a theory of aesthetics that emphasizes the socio-cultural context of use, and how people experience the world as embodied subjects [A, B].” (p455)
(A) Fiore S; Wright P; Edwards, A. “A Pragmatist Aesthetics approach to the design of a technological artifact” Proceedings of the 4th Decennial Conference on Critical Computing. (2005) pp 129-132, Aarhus, Denmark.
(B) Petersen, M.G., Iversen, O.S., Krogh, P.G. Ludvigsen, M., “Aesthetic interaction: A pragmatist’s aesthetics of interactive systems,” in Proc. DIS 2004, (2004), 269-276.

Taken from: Aesthetics in Human-Computer Interaction: Views and Reviews
AHMED, S. U., AL MAHMUD, A., AND BERGAUST, K. (2009) Aesthetics in Human-Computer Interaction: Views and Reviews. In Proceedings of the 13th international Conference on Human-Computer interaction. Part I: New Trends (San Diego, CA, July 19 – 24, 2009). J. A. Jacko, Ed. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, vol. 5610. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp559-568.

“But as the area is still very new and as HCI researchers are not experts on arts and aesthetics there is room for misunderstanding.” (p560)

“In the context of HCI two types of aesthetics are mentioned in [10], classical aesthetics
and expressive aesthetics. Classical aesthetics refer to traditional notions emphasizing orderly and clear design and expressive aesthetics to designs creativity and originality. Study shows that classical aesthetics is perceived more evenly by users whereas expressive aesthetics can vary depending on framing effects or different cultural and contextual stimuli [B]. Different kinds of quality dimensions are mentioned such as Ergonomic, Hedonic, Instrumental and Non-instrumental. Ergonomic quality comprises quality dimensions that are related to traditional usability, i.e. efficiency and effectiveness [C]. Hedonic quality comprises quality dimensions with no obvious relation to the task the user wants to accomplish with the system, such as originality, innovativeness, beauty etc. In other place, instrumental Quality and Non instrumental Quality is used in relation to perception of user experience which are basically the same as ergonomic and hedonic qualities [B].” (p562)

(A) Hartmann, J., Angeli, A.D., Sutcliffe, A.: Framing the user experience: information biases on website quality judgement. In: Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, pp. 855–864. ACM, Florence, Italy (2008)
(B) Mahlke, S., Thüring, M.: Studying antecedents of emotional experiences in interactive contexts. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. ACM, San Jose, California, USA (2007)
(C) Hassenzahl, M., Platz, A., Burmester, M., Lehner, K.: Hedonic and ergonomic quality aspects determine a software’s appeal. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, pp. 201–208. ACM, The Hague, The Netherlands (2000)

“Aesthetics come into play in many stages in many ways in HCI. In this section we would like to present the different areas and contexts where aesthetics is mentioned and addressed in our reviewed literature. From the review, we have identified some of the areas where aesthetics is used in HCI. Some of the key areas that we have identified are: Artifacts design, System design, Attractiveness and look and feel of User Interface (UI), Interaction with a system, Usability and user experience, Research methods for HCI.” (p562)

Taken from: Introduction To Special Issue On The Aesthetics Of Interaction
PETERSEN, M., L. HALLNAS, AND R. JACOBS. (2008) Introduction To Special Issue On The Aesthetics Of Interaction. In: ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 15, 3 (Nov) ACM New York, p1-5

“We are dealing with new devices and new qualities of use which are not necessarily related to efficiency but rather related to emotional qualities, to experiential qualities, and to aesthetic qualities (…) Aesthetics is increasingly viewed as a key issue with respect to interactive technology and we see this as a useful reference for digging into the new land of HCI. To some extent, it is a perspective and an area of research and development that has been hidden or forgotten for a rather long time. There are many reasons for this but an important one is the distinction between HCI as empirical science and HCI as design practice. There is often a gap between interaction design as a subject in the design schools and computer-human interaction as a behavioral science. Expressing functionality in the process of designing necessarily involves aesthetic considerations, whereas aesthetic experience is but one possible aspect of human-computer-interaction we might study.” (p1)

“From an analytic perspective, it relates to the study of the aesthetic aspects of human-computer interaction, that is, aesthetics as a part of art theory, critical studies, and empirical studies of aesthetic experience in behavioral science. From a design perspective, on the other hand, it relates to the development of expessive methods for interaction design work, that is, design aesthetics as a foundational component of design methodology. The distinction between experience and expression is a key issue here.” (p2)

“Thus aesthetics of interaction is beyond the appearance of products. It is tightly coupled to the use and to the interactivity enabled by computing. Aesthetics of interaction holds a double focus on experience and expression, making the foundations somewhat different from the aesthetic foundations of traditional product design.” (p2)

“A broad definition of the aesthetics of interaction as an area of research covering both perspectives could be something like investigating expressive aspects of human-computer interaction where investigating is understood in a broad sense, including empirical investigations of user experience, design experiments, and design methodology, as well as foundational work.” (p3)

“In all kinds of design, there is a double perspective of aesthetics: the expressiveness of the things, the systems we design, and the expressiveness of the use of these. We design things, but we also implicitly design acts of use. The expressiveness of use is of focal interest for the aesthetics of interaction. This means that we have to revisit the notions of form, expression, and experience and try to understand them from a somewhat different perspective. It is still a matter of understanding the intrinsic relationships between abstract form and concrete expression/experience but within a different context. To formulate coherent foundations, both with respect to analytic studies and to design methodology, may be the basic challenge for the aesthetics of interaction as an area of HCI research.” (p3)

“Aesthetic pragmatism has recently attracted a lot of interest in the design research discourse particularly in relation to the foundations of the aesthetics of interaction. This is a view on foundational matters that focuses on aesthetic experience. Viewing aesthetics as a logic of expression might be referred to as aesthetic realism; what is important are the expressions of use inscribed and inherent in the object, the system itself. The difference between aesthetic realism and aesthetic pragmatism lies in some sense in a difference in focus, that is, on form and expression on one hand, and performance and impression or experience on the other.” (p3)

“How can we design for aesthetics of interaction and how can we evaluate it, both qualitatively and quantitatively?” (p3)

Taken from: Towards the Study of Aesthetics in Information Technology
TRACTINSKY, N. (2004) Towards the Study of Aesthetics in Information Technology, In 25th Annual International Conference on Information Systems, Washington, DC, December 12-15, pp. 771-780

“It is argued that aesthetics is relevant to information technology research and practice for three theoretical reasons. (1) For many users, other aspects of the interaction hardly matter anymore. (2) Our evaluations of the environment are primarily visual, and the environment becomes increasingly replete with information technology. (3) Aesthetics satisfies basic human needs, and human needs are increasingly supplied by information technology. Aesthetics matters for a practical reason as well: it is here to stay. We propose a general framework for the study of aesthetics in information technology and provide some examples of research questions to illustrate the viability of this topic.” (p11)

“Whenever aesthetic issues are discussed in the HCI literature, they are likely to be qualified by warnings against its potentially detrimental effects (A).” (p12)
(A) Tractinsky, N. “Aesthetics and Apparent Usability: Empirically Assessing Cultural and Methodological Issues,” CHI 97 Conference Proceedings, ACM Press, New York, 1997, pp. 115-122.

“Interest in visual aesthetics (as distinguished from abstract elegance) is growing in the computing community as well. For example, the Aesthetic Computing community (A, B) is targeting the application of art theory and practice to computing in an attempt to augment existing representations and notions of aesthetics in computing by capitalizing on creativity and innovative exploration of media.” (p12)
(A) Fishwick P. A. “Aesthetic Programming: Crafting Personalized Software,” Leonardo (35:4), 2002, pp. 383–390.
(B) Fishwick P. A. “Aesthetic Computing Manifesto,” Leonardo (36:4), September 2003, p. 255.

“Recent research into the potential effects of emotions generated by artifacts has yielded several theoretical frameworks. Norman and his colleagues (A, B; C), suggest a three-level theory of human behavior that integrates two information processing systems: affective and cognitive. In each level, the world is being evaluated (affect) and interpreted (cognition). The lowest level processes take place at the visceral level, which surveys the environment and rapidly communicates affective signals to the higher levels. The routine (or behavioral) level is where most of our learned behavior takes place. Finally, the reflection level is where the highest-level processes occur. The important role of affect in human behavior stems from the fact that it can color subsequent cognitive processes because our thoughts normally occur after the affective system has transmitted its initial information. It is important to note that the affective system and the cognitive system are intertwined (D; C; E). Thus, while previous research in MIS and in HCI largely presumed that human decision making relies entirely on cognitive processes, current research on decision making portrays a different picture.” (p13)
(A) Norman, D. A. “Emotion and Design: Attractive Things Work Better,” Interactions (9:4), July-August 2002, pp. 36-42.
(B) Norman, D. A. Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things, Basic Books, New York, 2004
(C) Ortony, A., Norman, D. A., and Revelle, W. “The Role of Affect and Proto-Affect in Effective Functioning,” in Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Machine, J.-M. Fellous and M. A. Arbib (Eds.), Oxford University Press, New York, in press
(D) Bargh, J. A. “Bypassing the Will: Towards Demystifying the Nonconscious Control of social Behavior,” in The New
Unconscious, R. R. Hassin, J. S. Uleman, and J. A. Bargh (Eds.), Oxford University Press, New York, in press.
(E) Russell, J. A. “Core Affect and the Psychological Construction of Emotion,” Psychological Review (110:1), 2003, pp. 145-172.

“Aesthetic evaluations may take place on all three levels of the Norman model, but there are some hints that first aesthetic impressions are affective and are formed immediately at a low level and thus precede cognitive processes (A; B; C; D).” (p13)
(A) Fernandes, G., Lindgaard, G., Dillon, R., and Wood, J. “Judging the Appeal of Web Sites,” in Proceedings of the 4th World Congress on the Management of Electronic Commerce, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, January 15-17, 2003.
(B) Norman, D. A. Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things, Basic Books, New York, 2004
(C) Pham, M. T., Cohen, J. B., Pracejus, J. W., Hughes, G. D. “Affect Monitoring and the Primacy of Feelings in Judgment,” Journal of Consumer Research (28), 2001, 167-188.
(D) Zajonc, R. B., and Markus, H. “Affective and Cognitive Factors in Preferences,” Journal of Consumer Research (9:2),1982, pp.123-131.

“According to Maslow’s (1970) self-actualization theory, the need for aesthetic pleasure is one of the higher order (growth) needs, which are manifested after the lower level, more basic needs have been fulfilled to a satisfactory degree.” (p14)

“If once the value of computing technology was measured mostly by its usefulness for solving problems and by its ease of use, additional requirements, such as desirability, have now emerged. Issues of visual appeal and aesthetics have become an integral part of interactive system designs. Indeed, in stark contrast to the principles and the guidelines advocated by usability researchers and gurus, any random perusal of Web sites would suggest that aesthetic considerations are paramount in designing for the web.” (p14)

“we cannot ignore the fact that aesthetic matters become more pervasive than they used to be. Postrel argues that “sensory appeals are everywhere, they are increasingly personalized, and they are intensifying” (A, p5).” (p15)
(A) Postrel,V. The Substance of Style, Harper Collins, New York, 2002.

“Moreover, Postrel suggests that “the computer-driven democratization of design has made more people sensitive to graphic quality. Bit by bit, the general public has learned the literal and metaphorical language of graphic design. Carried by computers, aesthetics has spread to places and professions that were formerly off-limits to any such frivolity” (A, p55).” (p15)
(A) Postrel,V. The Substance of Style, Harper Collins, New York, 2002.

“The proposed framework is presented in the next subsection in a manner that conforms to the traditional experimental paradigm in IT. It treats aesthetics as a variable on par with other frequently studied variables in IS: in its core is an evaluative construct that is affected by some design characteristics of the IT artifact; it may, in turn, affect other IT-related variables; and those effects are moderated by still other conventional IT variables. The idea is to present the pervasive relevance of aesthetics to IT.” (p15)

“Finally, aesthetic considerations should eventually be translated into actual blueprints for design activities. This will not be easy. Much effort had been invested in order to transform design activities in organizations to accommodate firmitas and utilitas requirements. Methods and techniques to advance user-centered design have been proposed, but attempts to integrate them into mainstream development methodologies in industrial settings were met with only limited success (A). Many still mistakenly treat interaction design as an afterthought. Appropriately adding another element (aesthetics) to the list of requirements will not be trivial. But the rewards may be worth the trouble: after all, “attractive things work better” (B, p17).” (p17)
(A) Stewart, T. “Design and Development,” in The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook, J. Jacko, and A. Sears (Eds.), Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ, 2003.
(B) Norman, D. A. Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things, Basic Books, New York, 2004

Taken from: The Aesthetics Of Emergence: Co-Constructed Interactions
BALJKO, M. AND TENHAAF, N. (2008) The Aesthetics Of Emergence: Co-Constructed Interactions. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 15, 3, Article 11 (November 2008), pp1-27.

“The term aesthetic has proven to be notoriously difficult to pin down. For instance, sensory discrimination is touted as part of an aesthetic judgement, but aesthetic judgement is not merely that: the sensory discrimination must be linked to some sort of emotional elicitation (e.g., pleasure, disgust, humor).” (p3)

“The characterization of aesthetics that one constructs depends on the intended use or purpose of the characterization. The desire to sidentify tangible aspects of aesthetics motivates designers, even if only tacitly, and not only for the sake of conducting critiques—these tangible aspects are not only descriptive, but also can be predictive when they correspond to mechanisms whereby aesthetic judgements are made. But, as Heller [A, p. 49] points out, when it comes to visual and industrial design, certain tangible aspects have been employed to formalize our critiques of aesthetics (e.g., on the basis of aspects of line, color, weight, type, volume, space, etc.), but these tangible aspects are lacking when it comes to interaction design.” (p3)
(A) HELLER, D. 2005. Aesthetics and interaction design—some preliminary thoughts. Interactions 12, 5, 48–50.

“It follows, therefore, that the interaction is emergent to the participatory actions of the engaged actors (in the same sense that the playing of a duet is emergent to the participatory actions of the individual musicians). Thus, to return to our earlier assertion, a designer cannot design an interaction, because interactions depend crucially on the human interactants, who cannot be designed a priori. At best, a designer can design interactive media that affords certain types of interactions with the goal of eliciting interactions that have certain characteristics, provided that the behaviors of its human interactants fall within a particular scope.” (p5)

“Aesthetics is then based on a “logic of expressionals” that connects the material qualities of an artifact with its expressiveness. They go on to say that we can analyze such “expressiveness” of an interface structure, and that it is “comparable to analyzing the logical form of an argument and evaluating its logical correctness.” This idea of aesthetic is very much in the tradition of the Platonic Ideal that we referred to previously. Petersen et al. [A] present an overview of the concepts of aesthetics in HCI so as to situate their proposal for “aesthetic interaction” that is based in a pragmatist aesthetics, drawing on Shusterman [B].” (p6)
(A) PETERSEN, M., GRAVES, IVERSEN, O. S., KROUGH, P. G., AND LUDVIGSEN, M. 2004. Aesthetic interaction—a pragmatist’s aesthetics of interactive systems. In Proceedings of the Conference on Designing Interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods, and Techniques (DIS). Cambridge, MA.
(B) SHUSTERMAN, R. 1992. Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art. Blackwell, Cambridge, MA.

“The term aesthetics of interaction has been used in the sense of eliciting enjoyment, beauty, or pleasure in interaction: products that are “beautiful in use” [A, p. 296]. For instance: “we think the emphasis [in product design] should shift from a beautiful appearance to beautiful interaction, of which beautiful appearance is a part.” [B, p. 132].” (p6)
(A) DJAJADININGRAT, T., WENSVEEN, S., AND OVERBEEKE, K. 2004. Tangible products: redressing the balance between appearance and action. Personal Ubiq. Comput. 8, 5, 294–309.
(B) DJAJADININGRAT, J. P.,OVERBEEKE, C. J., ANDWENSVEEN, S. A.G. 2000b. Augmenting fun and beauty: a pamphlet. In Proceedings of Designing Augmented Reality Environments (DARE), Elsinore, Denmark, 131–134.

“A tangible design principle can be deduced from the research literature: “a requirement for an aesthetics of interaction is attention to the richness of a system’s appearance, interaction, and potential roles” [A, p. 66]; this means that, in order to elicit enjoyable/pleasurable interactions, attention must be paid to these facets of system (or interactive object) design.” (p7)
(A) DJAJADININGRAT, J. P., GAVER, W. W., AND FRENS, J. W. 2000a. Interaction relabelling and extreme characters: methods for exploring aesthetic interactions. In Proceedings of the Conference on Designing Interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods, and Techniques (DIS), Brooklyn, NY, (Aug. 17–19), 66–71.

“Embodiment is a key notion in Dautenhahn’s stance with respect to designing for interactions that are informed by social intelligence. Embodiment both affords one’s coupling to his or her environment and affords a state of being in the world. Dautenhahn identifies two types of dynamics that arise from one’s embodiment: the internal dynamics of experiencing of self and others (phenomenological dimension) and the external dynamics of having a physical body embedded in the world.” (p10)

“This is closely related to the conception of Petersen et al. [A, p. 271] of the socio-cultural dimension of a pragmatist aesthetics: “According to the thinking in pragmatist aesthetics, aesthetic is not something a priori in the world, but a potential that is released in dialogue as we experience the world; it is based on valuable use relations influencing the construction of our everyday life.”” (p12)
(A) PETERSEN, M., GRAVES, IVERSEN, O. S., KROUGH, P. G., AND LUDVIGSEN, M. 2004. Aesthetic interaction—a pragmatist’s aesthetics of interactive systems. In Proceedings of the Conference on Designing Interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods, and Techniques (DIS). Cambridge, MA.

“Petersen [A, p. 45] described her research group’s “focus on designing aesthetics of interaction, which implies a focus on how the means of interaction can be surprising, engaging, and serve to establish a new relationship to the materials that people interact with.” [italics added] We are basically in agreement with this characterization of the aesthetics of interaction (i.e., as the study of how affective states arise in interactants and how subjective attributions get made by interactants, as the result of or arising from an interaction).” (p#)
(A) PETERSEN, M. GRAVES. 2005. Interaction spaces: towards a better everyday? Interactions 12, 4, 44–45.

Taken from: What Is Beautiful Is Usable
TRACTINSKY, N., KATZ, A. S. AND IKAR, D. (2000) What Is Beautiful Is Usable. Interacting with Computers 13:pp127-145.

“About half a century later, Norman [A,B] laments the appropriation of modern design by designers who place aesthetics ahead of usability.” (p127)
(A) Norman, D.A., 1988. The Psychology of Everyday Things, Basic Books, New York.
(B) Norman, D.A., 1992. Turn Signals are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.

“Perhaps in a backlash to recent tendencies by the computer industry to oversell glitz and fashion in its products or because of its origins in disciplines that emphasize efficiency, the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) appears to stress the prominence of usability over aesthetics. There is little doubt that, in general, the criterion of aesthetic design is an integral part of effective interaction design [A].” (p128)
(A) Alben, L., 1996. Quality of experience: defining the criteria for effective interaction design. Interactions 3 (3), 11-15.

“In a sense the concepts of aesthetics and usability represent two orthogonal dimensions of HCI. Whereas aesthetics usually refers often to non-quantifiable, subjective, and affect based experience of system use, usability is commonly measured by relatively objective means and sets efficiency as its foremost criterion [A].” (p128)
(A) Butler, K.A., 1996. Usability engineering turns 10. Interactions 3 (1), 59-75.

“previous research suggests that aesthetic perceptions of an interface are highly correlated with perceptions of the interface’s ease of use [A,B]. Therefore, it appears that users do not perceive these two design dimensions as independent.” (p128)
(A) Kurosu, M., Kashimura, K., 1995. Apparent usability vs. inherent usability, CHI. ’95, pp. 292-293.
(B) Tractinsky, N., 1997. Aesthetics and apparent usability: empirically assessing cultural and methodological issues. CHI 97 Conference Proceedings, Atlanta, 22-27 March, ACM, New York, pp. 115-122.

“Spool et al. [A] argue that “…no one surfs the online employee policy manual just for kicks” (p. 4). They conclude “we found no evidence that graphic design helps users retrieve information on a web site” (p. 83, italics added). Unfortunately, this approach ignores the affective aspect of users’ behavior [B] and its relevance to HCI. It also ignores the potential relationships that exist between usability and aesthetics and their combined effect on users’ evaluation of computer systems.” (p129)
(A) Spool, J.M., Scanlon, T., Schroeder, W., Snyder, C., DeAngelo, T., 1999. Web Site Usability: A Designer’s Guide, Morgan Kaufman, Los Altos, CA.
(B) Laurel, B., 1991. Computers as Theatre, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.

“We speculate that the strong correlations found between perceived usability and aesthetics resemble findings in the social psychology literature about the relationships between physical attractiveness and socially desirable characteristics.” (p129)

“because physical beauty is the most obvious and accessible personal characteristic accessible to others [A], it is perceived early in the interaction and then tends to color later perceptions and inferences about other personal characteristics.” (p129)
(A) Dion, K., Berscheid, E., Walster, E., 1972. What is beautiful is good. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 24 (3), 285-290.

“To conclude, three different processes may induce positive relationships between interface aesthetics and perceived usability: (a) A popular stereotyping which might associate successful design on one (noticeable) design dimension with successful design of other, less implicit design dimensions. (b) A halo effect may cause carry over of an aesthetic (or not aesthetic) design to perceptions of other design features. (c) An affective response to the design’s aesthetics may improve users’ mood and their overall evaluations of the system.” (p130)

“This study demonstrated once again the tight relationships between users’ initial perceptions of interface aesthetics and their perceptions of the system’s usability. Moreover, we showed that these relations endure even after actual use of the system. We believe that these results shed new light on the role of aesthetics in HCI design and its effects on how users experience their interaction with computerized systems. The results of this study are commensurate with social psychology findings that people associate a person’s physical attractiveness with other personal attributes. Similarly, research in the areas of marketing and consumer behavior indicate that aesthetic features of the shopping environment are perceived as related to other, seemingly independent attributes (e.g. functional) of that environment. Obviously, more research is needed to assess the contingencies and boundaries of the aesthetics-usability relationships. Most importantly, these relationships should be studied during a longer time frame than we were able to do. Yet, we believe that there is sufficient evidence already to justify the elevation of the issue of aesthetic design from its current standing at the cellars of HCI research.” (pp141-142)

Taken from: Aesthetics and Apparent Usability: Empirically Assessing Cultural and Methodological Issues
TRACTINSKY, N. (1997) Aesthetics and Apparent Usability: Empirically Assessing Cultural and Methodological Issues. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, United States, March 22 – 27, 1997). S. PEMBERTON, Ed. CHI ’97. ACM, New York, NY, pp115-122.

“The role of aesthetics in human affairs has been widely documented (e.g., [A]). Conventional wisdom relates it to our appreciation of, and attitudes towards computer systems as well. However, aesthetics may not always coincide with usability. In fact, the opposite might occur. In one of HCI’s most influential books, “The Psychology of Everyday Things”, Norman vividly ridicules the tendency of designers to neglect usability in favor of aesthetics [B] (pp. 151-155). Similarly, others (e.g. [C, D]), while acknowledging the role of aesthetics in HCI, warn against a tendency among designers to emphasize the aesthetic elements of the user interface, because these might degrade usability. The contribution of aesthetics to HCI, they argue, should be measured in terms of facilitating information processing, not in terms of engaging the user in a pleasing experience.” (p#)
(A) Maquet, J. The Aesthetic Experience. Yale University Press, 1986.
(B) Norman, D.A. The Psychology of Everyday Things. Basic Books, 1988.
(C) Foley, J.D., van Dam, A., Feiner, S.K., and Hughes, J.F. Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice (2nd ed.). Addison-Wesley, 1990.
(D) Marcus, A. Graphic Design for Electronic Documents And User Interfaces. ACM Press, 1992.

“Clearly, aesthetic perceptions are culturally dependent [A, 17]. Thus, one can reasonably expect the relationships between aesthetics and apparent usability to vary across cultures.” (p#)
(A) Fernandes, T. Global Interface 6. Design. AP Professional, 1995.
(B) Maquet, J. The Aesthetic Experience. Yale University Press, 1986.

“First, aesthetic perception and its relations to HCI relevant constructs are culturally dependent. Second, our current knowledge limits our ability to accurately predict how culture influences HCI related issues. Third, the results provide further support for the contention that perceptions of interface aesthetic are closely related to apparent usability and thus increase the likelihood that aesthetics may considerably affect system acceptability.” (p#)