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Aesthetics and Imagination

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Imagination + Technology

Part of the book series: Human–Computer Interaction Series ((HCIS))

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Abstract

While recent years have witnessed an “aesthetic turn” in HCI, we are still awaiting the arrival of an agreed “digital aesthetics”. However, it is widely recognised that aesthetics have an important role in the overall experience of digital technology and that they may also be the single most important factor in deciding which (say) mobile phone to buy. While this may seem a very specific example, phones have proved to be the most ubiquitous of all digital artefacts, and we buy on them on basis of how they look. Yet despite the importance of aesthetics, no one (inevitably) can agree quite what they are, why we seem to be geared towards them (why, for example, 17,000 years ago were the good people of Lascaux painting the walls of caves rather than inventing the wheel?). Aesthetics have attracted a great number of musings, “slogans” and even factor analytic treatments, for example, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote that the imagination provides for ‘free play’ with aesthetics to create an affective state with a positive valence (that is, and I paraphrase, attractive things make us feel good); Norman has proposed that “attractive things are easy to use” while Hassenzahl has argued that the aesthetics enable us to identify with them and/or be stimulated by them (“we find attractive things, attractive”). We are very good (that is, both quick and accurate) at judging the attractiveness of people (their faces in particular) and this ability may be in play when we make judgements about digital technology. And of course, our interest here is again confined to the interplay between imagination and aesthetics. Our approach in this chapter is to treat imagination as seeing-as, that is, by adopting an aesthetic perspective rather than our usual veridical view of the world, we see artefacts, people, and events as attractive (or not) and consequently, a source of pleasure, easy to use or attractive. This is not and cannot be anything like a complete description of aesthetics but it does allow us to introduce imagination to the discussion in a coherent fashion. This is aesthetics, for example, as a source of appropriation; and aesthetics as a prop; and so forth.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/most-popular-websites.

  2. 2.

    The questionnaire consists of twenty-one 7-point items with bipolar verbal anchors.

  3. 3.

    https://www.pinterest.com/pin/357262182910501935/?nic=1.

  4. 4.

    Richardson, W. J., 1963, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff Publishing.

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  1. School of Computing, Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh, UK

    Phil Turner

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Turner, P. (2020). Aesthetics and Imagination. In: Imagination + Technology. Human–Computer Interaction Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37348-1_4

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