

Article 1652 of comp.cog-eng:
Path: mimsy!nems!ark1!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!uupsi!sunic!kth.se!news
>From: [email-masked] (Ian Feldman)
Newsgroups: comp.cog-eng
Subject: Re: aesthetics of the interface
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
Date: 3 May 90 07:00:18 GMT
References: <[email-masked]>
Reply-To: [email-masked] (Ian Feldman)
Organization: Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
Lines: 72

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked]
(Thom Gillespie) writes:

> [.....]  I also think that aesthetics
> may be a very important element but that it is overlooked by 
> technical designers for 2 reasons: the skill is lacking in the
> interface designer and it may be impossible to 'quantify' the
> aesthetic experience other than to ask did you like it or was
> it pretty. A lot of interface evaluation work seems to be
> aimed at what it is possible to quantify rather than what
> should be examined -- this isn't limited to interface design
> and evaluation. 

  You said it -- the belief that only quantifiable qualities may apply
  rules allover.  This is sometimes termed as the "Einstein complex"
  (or syndrome) in humanistic sciences -- after WWII and the atom bomb
  when large grants were made available to the ballistics/ mathematics/
  physics and engineering sciences there has been a marked turn in the
  way that the cognitive science projects justify their existence.

  Basically, they try to prove their worth with numbers, since these
  at least are "hard" data, less prone to misinterpretation and down-
  grading by public-accounting-minded administrators than mere logic/
  philosophic statements.  Also we are living in the Western society
  where a "worth-enhancing" engineer has for the past 500 years always
  had greater status than, say, a monk transcribing verses by hand,
  who's merely trying to achieve an esthetic (and pious) "non-productive"
  manuscript.  Thus an artist's contribution to any given engineering/
  manufacturing goal is always viewed (by engineers but also by "popular
  consesus") as something less worthy of respect and definitely not
  worthy the status of equal-resources during some project's design/
  prototyping stage.  Usually the artist gets called in at the last
  possible moment, to provide an esthetically-pleasing shell to what's
  basically esthetically misguided in the first place.  That's the
  best scenario; the worst ones' end results are all around us.

> Can a word processor be aesthetically pleasing and not be of sound
> design? Can you design an unaesthetic version of PacMan? 

  Aren't they all anyway?  The word processors, I mean, also the
  PacMans.  Most of today's widely spread software has been designed
  by the techies, giving us what is economically, technologically
  and "pragmatically" feasible, rather than what's esthetically pleasing.
  And as long as the computer-based tools will be viewed purely in
  terms of efficiency and accountability then we'll probably not see any
  products that are designed to provide as much aesthetic gratification
  as the "productivity-enhancing" features of its other parts.

  [......]

> The division between what is cognitive and affective is firmly
> entrenched in society and still reflected in this discussion group
> by having it named cognitive engineering as opposed to affective
> engineering -- no I'm not trying for yet another discussion group.
> I'm just thinking outloud and in public.

> --Thom Gillespie

  Still, not thinking of the esthetic aspects of what we're
  producing affects us all..... did you, Thom, think about that
  your near-80 character lines of the original post (that I had to
  reformat  by hand)  may not look very pleasing to the eye on aan
  80-chaacter vt100 screen, when included in a letter with just a ">"
  and a space in front of them?  In that state they were also much
  harder to read and comprehend, than if they were shorter, laid out
  nicely and delimited by plenty of consequently-applied white space
  around it.  Just asking rhetoric questions out loud.... ;-))

--Ian Feldman / [email-masked]  ||  uunet!nada.kth.se!ianf / The "I had the
        bug narrowed down to a subrutine and then I lost all interest" hacker