Aesthetic Sustainability

Product Design and Sustainable Usage

Kristine Harper, Rasmus Rahbek Simonsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351749022
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Produktdesign

Why do we readily dispose of some things, whereas we keep and maintain others for years, despite their obvious wear and tear? Can a greater understanding of aesthetic value lead to a more strategic and sustainable approach to product design? Aesthetic Sustainability: Product Design and Sustainable Usage offers guidelines for ways to reduce, rethink, and reform consumption. Its focus on aesthetics adds a new dimension to the creation, as well as the consumption, of sustainable products. The chapters offer innovative ways of working with expressional durability in the design process.

Aesthetic Sustainability: Product Design and Sustainable Usage is related to emotional durability in the sense that the focus is on the psychological and sensuous bond between subject and object. But the subject–object connection is based on more than emotions: aesthetically sustainable objects continuously add nourishment to human life. This book explores the difference between sentimental value and aesthetic value, and it offers suggestions for operational approaches that can be implemented in the design process to increase aesthetic sustainability. This book also offers a thorough presentation of aesthetics, focusing on the correlation between the philosophical approach to the aesthetic experience and the durable design experience.

The book is of interest to students and scholars working in the fields of design, arts, the humanities and social sciences; additionally, it will speak to designers and other professionals with an interest in sustainability and aesthetic value.

1
The Pleasure of the Familiar

There is a great deal of satisfaction, or even a great deal of pleasure, in experiencing one’s milieu and the objects in it being exactly as expected. This kind of satisfaction is related to the comfortable feeling of security that we experience when facing familiar phenomena and events, and it basically consists of knowing precisely what is expected of us, and how we should act and interact with others. It is a satisfaction linked to order and harmony and particularly to predictability; furthermore, it is closely connected to the human need to structure everyday life and create routines for ourselves.

The Pleasure of the Familiar results from experiencing the artifacts in one’s surroundings as being, acting, and working just as expected:

• It can be related to touching the surface of a table, expecting a certain familiar tactile experience—coolness, smoothness, or hardness—and getting exactly that experience.
• It can consist in putting on a dress and experiencing that the fit is exactly as expected, and that it wraps the body in precisely the way that one anticipated: the feeling, or touch experience, matches the look of the fabric.
• It can refer to the experience of holding a jacket in a shop and immediately being able to decode or understand how to put it on, how to open and close it.
• It can be associated with the experience of a blanket or a shawl having a well-balanced color combination that creates a harmonic expression of comfort and safety.
• It can also be described as the pleasure of pulling a chair out from under a table and experiencing exactly the anticipated degree of weight as well as the expected surface touch experience—meaning the tactile experience of the material being in accordance with the visual experience.
• It can be the comfortable and pleasant experience of being immediately able to use a kitchen utensil that has not previously been held or used—a potato peeler, a corkscrew, a coffeepot or a spoon—simply because its shape and functionality can be understood based on mental references to other similar objects. This sort of comfortable design experience is also related to the fact that the way the object should be used is inherent to its shape; our hands just intuitively know what to do.
• It can, more abstractly, be described as the pleasure of seeing how the material effortlessly or naturally fits the shape of the object. That the material, in other words, doesn’t possess a great deal of inertia in relation to the shape.¹
• It can be the satisfying experience of entering a café never previously visited and realizing that it is designed and structured in exactly the same way as other, familiar cafés. Due to the familiar layout, one will know how to act, for example, in finding a table, ordering at the counter, paying for the order, and returning to one’s seat.
• Or, it can be related to the pleasurable experience of finding one’s way effortlessly through a city or a building by following easily decodable pictograms or easily understandable signs.

We all need comfortable habitual or habit-generating experiences like the above. Without experiences like these, our surroundings and milieu would feel like one big unmanageable chaos, which would require a lot of energy and strenuous activity to navigate. We need to feel that we are, at least to some extent, in control of our surroundings, that we can grasp and understand the artifacts and the space structures that surround us. And we need to know the “ground rules” of our everyday milieux—a need that is rather physical or connected to bodily experience. Furthermore, we need to feel safe and that we belong (to other people and spaces); we also need to know how to act in the “right” way socially and culturally as well as in relation to the objects and artifacts that surround us. If the objects we come across in our daily lives work as expected or provide us with the anticipated sensuous impressions, we are able to meet our human need to feel in control; to feel safe; and to act within comfortable, familiar settings.

Aesthetically, the Pleasure of the Familiar can be linked to the concept of the beautiful. The Pleasure of the Familiar, after all, is linked to the human need and ability to apprehend and use common, everyday objects, as this boosts our physical comfort level. Therefore, in order to define and analyze the durable aesthetic experience concerning the Pleasure of the Familiar, I will begin by introducing the term the beautiful in its historico-aesthetic context and in relation to the aesthetic experience.

The beautiful

When working with aesthetics and the aesthetic experience, there are two fundamental and important terms to consider: the beautiful and the sublime. These two terms, which in many ways represent two fundamentally different sides of the aesthetic experience, have been made subject to numerous philosophical theses and art historical discussions. In the following section, I will draw on a few of these, since they have influenced my interpretation of the durable expression and aesthetic sustainability.

The historical division between the beautiful and the sublime indicates that an aesthetic experience is not necessarily linked to beauty, but can also be induced by the unpleasant, unbalanced, distorted, or even hideous. This could include a dilapidated old house or a frightening demonic figure in a gothic church.

The most significant differences between the beautiful and the sublime can be outlined like so:

Beautiful	Sublime
Symmetry	Asymmetry
Comfortable	Uncomfortable
Order	Chaos
Predictability	Unpredictability
Demarcation	Limitlessness
Shape	Shapelessness
Balance	Unbalanced, distorted

Briefly put, the beautiful can be defined as a mode of expression that complies with the aesthetic ground principles concerning, for example, color harmonies and composition. As the counterpoint to the beautiful, the sublime characterizes phenomena or objects that provide receivers with a kind of aesthetic pleasure that doesn’t match the “classical” concept of beauty, or that disrupt the universal ground rules of aesthetics. I will return to the concept of the sublime in Chapter 2, but first we must understand and analyze the concept of beauty as it relates to aesthetic sustainability and design.

The beautiful is mainly linked to shape or to proportional, harmonic objects that provide the receiver or viewer with immediate pleasure. The connection between the beautiful and shape, or proportion and balance, is rooted in ancient times. Aristotle (384–322 BC) describes in his Metaphysics how the Pythagoreans (from the 6th century BC) viewed the world’s manifestations as mathematically structured and determined by numeric relations. To the Pythagoreans, beauty was identical to order and thereby not only linked to the human experience of the world, but rather to something absolute, something unchangeable and universal. Beauty was seen as the sum of the world’s harmonious, symmetrical, proportional forms (Jørgensen 2008: 29).

To Plato (c. 428–348 BC), a physical object can be considered beautiful if it clearly expresses the form or idea that gave birth to it. A beautiful chair, according to this way of thinking, is a chair that is clearly recognizable as being a chair and that is good at being a chair. There is thus a kind of precision to beauty (Böhme 2010: 24). Beauty is precise and unambiguous in its expression. Beautiful physical objects are clearly expressed and decoded as what they are, at the same time as they are good at being what they are. Such a viewpoint contains the germ of a functionalist approach to thinking aesthetics. Functionalism, a term for defining the style and historical context of early 20th century design and architecture, is dominated by simplicity and objectivity, understood as form being subservient to function. “Form follows function” is a well-known adage ascribed to functionalism, which aimed to cleanse form of anything but the absolute most necessary elements. The famous phrase was uttered by the American architect Louis Sullivan (1856–1924), and it was in direct opposition to the organic decorative idiom of the previous art-nouveau period. The Bauhaus architect and furniture designer Marcel Breuer (1902–1981) called his chairs “sitting machines” and hereby gestured to the ancient idea that a chair is beautiful if it is good at being what it is. A chair becomes a sitting machine insofar as it is good to sit in. The form and expression of an object are thus inferior to its function. This is the functionalist definition of beauty.

In part, then, beauty is about functionality. Or, at least, about a precise, unambiguous minimalist idiom that is easy to decode or “take in.”

In the Platonic dialogue Greater Hippias (c. 390 BC) Socrates and Hippias are searching for a definition of beauty, and as part of this search, they try to determine whether a spoon made from gold is more beautiful than one made from fig wood (Plato 1997: 908). Socrates feigns uncertainty. Of course, a golden spoon is finer (and thus more attractive) than its wooden counterpart, but it is harder to handle when eating soup. In the final analysis, the wooden spoon is more beautiful since it is better at being what it is (that is, a spoon); it is more functional, useful. In Plato, beauty is linked to the good. In this way, for an object to be considered beautiful and, hence, durable, the material must, crucially, follow form. In Chapter 4, I will go into more detail about the experience of materials.

Plato’s way of correlating beauty with the good (or the functional) is in contradiction with my initial hypothesis that aesthetic appeal is foundational to aesthetic durability: a kind of senseless attraction or emotional attachment, which is largely irrational, and which is thus not based on an assessment of whether the object in question adequately fulfills its prescribed function. An object’s immediate power of attraction can render inoperative any critical assessment of its functional qualities; in turn, once momentary fascination fades, this can lead to a sense of frustration.

On the one hand, it can seem right that an object should be good at being what it is (it is after all pleasurable to experience and interact with an object that seems to be perfectly aligned with its functional basis of existence). On the other hand, there are objects whose primary function seems to be that of producing aesthetic pleasure for human beings. We would call such objects aesthetically functional. Functionality should thus not be understood solely in terms of usefulness, and consequently, usefulness should not be the only determining factor for assessing an object’s durability. In the context of the beautiful, in contrast with the sublime, functionality can therefore be defined as accommodating humanity’s preference for the orderly, the proportional, and the well structured.

A preference for proportion, balance, and symmetrical form—which characterizes classic Greek art—entails that the purest geometric forms are considered the most beautiful, as their mathematical proportionality is the most simple. In this approach to form, which is largely based on maintaining proper proportionality, beauty is consummate with the idea of beauty, or what characterizes all beautiful objects (Jørgensen 2008: 39). The idea of beauty is the essence of beauty, and the ultimate chair is thus the essence of what a chair is and does, like the spoon to end all spoons.

Based on my ambition to construct concrete guidelines for creating aesthetically sustainable design, I want to determine a common denominator for all beautiful things. The question is, however, if beauty is to be found alone in things, or if it is rather to be found in the interaction between object and subject. As I am primarily interested in exploring the aesthetic experience, I will presume that crucial to determining the essence of beauty is namely the experience of things and thus the interaction between subject and object.

Regarding aesthetics, Danish professor of philosophy and the history of ideas, Dorthe Jørgensen writes:

Beauty isn’t just an aspect of the thing we can apprehend and refer to as beautiful. Beauty isn’t merely objective; it doesn’t appear in the world as a given. But beauty isn’t subjective either; it is not simply in the eye of the beholder.

She continues:

Beauty exists in the meeting point between a potentially beautiful object and a subject who, by virtue of her gaze, makes possible the experience of beauty as such.

(Jørgensen 2012: 35; transl.)

Two central elements appear here: 1) the object of potential beauty and 2) the subject who has the ability to experience beauty. The next two sections will therefore look at the potentially beautiful object to determine whether it is possible to set down universal criteria for judging objective beauty. Additionally, the sections will deal with the experiencing subject and her cultural “baggage” or connotative frame and its importance for potential aesthetic experiences. The question becomes: can we be brought up with or develop the capacity for such experiences?

Adhering to universal aesthetic principles

When can an object be experienced as being beautiful? Following the previous section, the beautiful aesthetic experience can be defined as the experience of harmonious form and the proportional, the symmetrical, and the demarcated; in other words, beauty is a “smooth” experience where nothing impedes one’s ability to apprehend or take in the object or phenomenon one encounters. However, as human beings are all different—with different preferences, tastes, lifestyles, and cultural backgrounds—everybody has a different opinion about what counts as beautiful, exciting, moving, captivating, etc. For this reason, does it even make sense to talk about universal aesthetic principles?

The short answer is that, yes, it does make sense. Of course, personal taste, trends, and the Zeitgeist are all involved when discussing aesthetics and beauty. Nevertheless, there are universal, or common, human preferences concerning which elements make up the most comfortable expression or idiom. People may be different, but we all share certain physiological traits, and likewise, our senses respond to stimuli in much the same way. For that reason, despite our many differences, it might still be possible to construct a set of principles for how shapes, colors, and materials are experienced and internalized by the senses, and for how a priori (i.e. before interpretation and tacked-on meanings are applied) which expressions are considered the most balanced and immediately apprehensible.

Throughout history, a number of thinkers have done exactly that. In what follows, I will make reference to some of these in order to theoretically define the comfortable aesthetic expression, which may lead to the Pleasure of the Familiar.

The need for structure and balance

The German philosopher and psychologist of perception Rudolf Arnheim (1904–2007) considers a natural function of sight to actively select and categorize; for example, oval shapes are spontaneously and immediately categorized as variations on circles. In the effort to order and understand our surroundings, the human sense organs will naturally seek out forms that are easy to recognize and label.

When human beings apply their senses, they seek to structure the world, and this can be described as a tactile process that is aimed at sorting out coherent shapes from the many distorted surfaces and forms of the world. As Arnheim puts it:

In looking at an object, we reach out for it. With an invisible finger we move through the space around us, go out to the distant places where things are found, touch them, catch them, scan their surfaces, trace their borders, explore their texture. Perceiving shapes is an eminently active occupation.

(Arnheim 1974: 43)

In Art and Visual Perception, Arnheim lays out a number of concrete principles for spontaneous universal human visual experiences. For example, it may be that “an unbalanced composition looks accidental, transitory, and therefore invalid” (Arnheim 1974: 20), and consequently, designers seekin...