Aesthetic appreciation of tactile unity-in-variety in product designs

The principle of unity-in-variety has recently been shown to affect visual aesthetic appreciation of product designs. We investigated whether this principle can also account for tactile aesthetic appreciation of products. Design students rated nine car keys on unity, variety and aesthetic appreciation through tactile exploration only. Results...

The development of a reliable and valid scale to measure aesthetic pleasure in design

There is a lack of consistency regarding the scales used to measure aesthetic pleasure. They are often chosen ad hoc or derived from other research fields but never validated for design. Moreover, those scales often do not measure aesthetic pleasure in isolation, but instead include its determinants (e.g., novelty). Therefore, we developed a...

Influence of social connectedness and autonomy on aesthetic pleasure for product designs

to feel connected to and autonomous from their ‘type of people’ and when product designs do they are aesthetically pleasing. From an evolutionary perspective, product designs provide aesthetic pleasure because they help direct beneficial behavior. We argue that people can fulfill their evolutionary need for safety through product designs that...

The joint effect of typicality and novelty on aesthetic pleasure for product designs: Influences of safety and risk

While some studies have shown that people prefer typical product designs, others have shown that people also like product designs that are new. To reconcile these contradictory findings, the design principle, ‘Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable’ proposes that people prefer a balance of both typicality and novelty in product designs. As an explanation...

The combined effect of perceptual and conceptual dimensions on product design aesthetics

In design research perceptual features of a design such as unity- in-variety as well as conceptual properties (whether the design is a good instantiation of designer’s intentions) have been found to affect the aesthetic experience independently. In the course of a research design using systematic manipulations of USB stick designs in three...