Nick Young: "The Aesthetics of Invisible Design"

Nick Young, University of Genova: "The Aesthetics of Invisible Design"

Abstract
Good design seems like something that we can aesthetically appreciate. For example, we appreciate ‘design classics’ like the ‘contour’ coke bottle, and the Fender Stratocaster. There are also commonly agreed upon examples of bad design, such as the logo of the London 2012 Olympics. In cases like these, aesthetic appreciation depends on visual experience; it is the look of the coke bottle or Olympic logo that is the focus of aesthetic appreciation.

A common refrain, however, is that 'good design is invisible', integrating seamlessly with users' needs and not drawing attention to itself, in contrast to bad design which is noticeably inadequate. But if good design is invisible, or at least some aspects of it are, how can it be aesthetically appreciated? Our aim here is to find a convincing answer to this question.

Drawing on Nguyen and Saito, we suggest that the appreciation of invisible design can be understood in terms of the aesthetic appreciation of one's own actions. A well-designed artifact is one that elicits aesthetically pleasing actions when in use. However, this raises the question: how can we aesthetically appreciate our own actions?

We consider two possibilities: applying existing theories of object appreciation to the appreciation of actions, and equating aesthetically pleasing actions with easy actions. We argue that neither is especially promising and that a more viable approach would be to use Dreyfus' notion of skillful coping. That is, the idea that skillful action is a matter of intuitive and effortless interaction with objects, whereby actions are performed without conscious deliberation. We argue this is a plausible way of understanding how we can aesthetically appreciate both our actions and well-designed artifacts. A well-designed object will elicit fluid, aesthetically rewarding actions in a user, whereas a badly designed object will impede this sort of interaction, making the user's actions laborious and unintuitive and requiring a heavy reliance on conscious thought.