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Beauty as a design prize*

David M. Frohlich
Hewlett Packard Laboratories
A beauty story: I was driving along an empty motorway at seven o'clock one Saturday morning. It was a glorious spring day and the sun was casting long shadows over the English countryside. One of my favourite pieces of classical music was playing on the car stereo, and I was on my way to a conference in Vienna. As I glanced to my left, I was struck by a scene of haunting beauty. Mist was rising from a meadow. It curled slowly in the sunlight to reveal traces of the hillside behind it. At the top of the hill, trees were silhouetted against the blue sky. For a moment, I was lost in the scene, as if entering a picture. And I didn't want to leave.

Initial reactions
Good papers make you think. They make you think about what the author said. But they also make you think about what you believe about what the author said. They evoke a response. So I am very grateful to be given a chance to comment on Hassenzahls article which was a good paper in this sense for me. My response will be a little about what he said, but mainly about what I believe about its subject matter, after further reading and reflection. My initial reaction to the paper was contradictory. On the one hand I was full of admiration for Hazzenzahls courage in tackling the issue of beauty head on. This attempt can be seen as part of a trend in HCI towards the understanding of new dimensions of design beyond functionality and usability. This trend is as big as the one observed by Grudin (1990) in redefining the human-computer interface in more social, organisational and cultural terms. This time it has to do with redefining the goal of HCI design in more aesthetic and experiential terms (Jordan 2000, Norman 2004). The place of beauty in the aesthetics of HCI design is currently unclear, so Hazzenzahls attempt to define and measure it is brave. On the other hand, I was disturbed precisely by the way beauty was defined and measured in the study. It didnt seem to me to be the kind of thing that could be measured so easily with a seven-point bipolar scale and a pencil. I worried about the fact that only one of the original MP3 player skins was judged to be technically beautiful by lying significantly above zero on this scale. And I wondered what real basis the students had for rating the skins in Study 1, especially when they hadnt had a chance to use them. In fact, the whole scientific approach to beauty taken in the paper did not seem to address the issue of beauty in design, or even be appropriate to addressing it. It just didnt seem respectful enough. When I was asked to write a response to the paper, I resolved to test these reactions with a thought experiment. I planned to monitor my own experiences of beauty between then and the deadline for the response, wherever they originated. One of
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Published in Human Computer Interaction 19 (4): 359-366. Special issue on Beauty, Goodness and Usability

these experiences is described in the beauty story above. The rarity and intensity of these experiences confirmed my reservations about the paper, and convinced me that beauty as I knew it was not really manipulated or addressed in the study at all. In the rest of this note I will try to justify this position, with the help of a rich tradition of philosophical writing about beauty going back 2500 years. In particular I want to point out the difference between the property-called-beauty that was measured by Hassenzahl, and beauty as it has been defined in this literature. On the basis of this contrast I will argue that beauty is not an objective continuous property of interactive products, but rather a rare and discrete response by users to something they see in those products or their interaction with them. This response can be seen as a kind of lay design award of the purest kind: a prize for design rather than a feature of the designed product. This view has implications of course for the way beauty might be addressed in future studies and in design practice itself. I cover some of these at the end of the essay.

Beauty as a property
Beauty is a very old topic in philosophy. Early writers proposed that beauty was an objective property of objects, while later writers suggested that it was more of a subjective experience triggered by objects. This debate continues today around the issue of taste in judgements of beauty, and whether or not there is such a thing as good taste in recognising beauty to be found in the world. Let us review this literature in relation to the Hazzenzahl paper. The Greek mathematician Pythagoras was one of the first to write about beauty in the sixth century BC. He introduced the idea that beauty stems from the use of orderly proportions in nature or man-made objects. This idea originated from his research on music where he discovered that harmonies related to the length of various pieces of string, plucked together. He generalised this notion in the term music of the spheres, which was used to refer to the harmonies inherent in the proportions of things in the physical world. The same notion has been applied to architecture down the ages, and is even alive today in cosmetic surgery which attempts to adjust the proportions of facial features to enhance appearance (cited in Armstrong 2004). The first scientific experiment on beauty was carried out by Hogarth in 1753 (also cited in Armstrong 2004). It was based on Pythagoras idea that beauty was an objective property of objects related to their proportions. Hogarth invited readers of the Covent-Garden journal, where he published many of his satirical sketches, to pick out the most beautiful corset from a set of seven different designs. The designs were varied systematically in the extent to which the corsets curved around the body. As an aid to the reader, Hogarth suggested imagining the actions of lacing the corset from behind. A corset somewhere in the middle of the range was preferred, and Hogarth took this to imply that the curves in this design were the most beautiful in form. He repeated this exercise with pictures of noses, haircuts and table legs. Hassenzahls studies are in the same tradition. He asks subjects to rate objects for beauty and uses these ratings, with others, to reason about the origin of beauty in the designs. The problem with this view of beauty-in-the-object is that people dont always see it. They often disagree about which is the most beautiful object in a set, or about the ratings of individual objects. We can see this in the standard deviations of Figure 1 in the Hassenzahl paper. Although QuickSkin was judged to be the most beautiful MP3

player with a mean score of 0.89, those scores varied within a range of about 1.4 points, i.e. between about 0.2 and 1.6 on the scale. Higher levels of disagreement were evident in the ratings of some of the other skins. So the definition of beauty in these types of experiments is a statistical construct. It is simply the most common judgement of beauty by a group of judges. If we take the judgement of any one of the judges and compare it to the group judgement we might find some important differences and implications. If beauty is an objective property of objects, why cant some people recognise it? Can we really say that the judgement of a group identifies beauty in a way that the judgement of an individual does not? And if individuals cant recognise beauty, is it their fault?

Beauty as an experience
The above dilemma is reminiscent of Normans (1988) observation that people tend to blame themselves for having usability problems with interactive products, rather than the product design. Should they also blame themselves for having aesthetic problems with products, by not recognising the beauty that others tell them is there? Of course not! The problem here is not with the judge, but with the definition of what is being judged. Building on a variety of critiques of beauty by Aquinus, Spinoza, Hume and Montesquieu, Kant (1750) finally redefined beauty as being not in the object, but in the eye of the beholder. The reason people disagreed about the beauty of objects according to Kant was because beauty was first and foremost a subjective experience. It was a form of pleasure experienced in response to an object. It could therefore differ between people in response to the same object. So each individual persons judgement of beauty could be seen as valid in and of itself. Furthermore, Kant argued that the pleasure involved in the experience of beauty was of a particular kind. It involved a transcendental, all-or-nothing response to the whole object, rather than some cumulative level of liking of individual attributes. The transcendental quality of the beauty experience is hard to describe and defend today, but was central to the Christian philosophy of the middle ages. More recently, Kirwan (1999) has argued that it is also central to a contemporary understanding of beauty itself. After Kant, he defines beauty as a rare kind of pleasure which is either invoked or not invoked by an object. The distinguishing characteristic of this pleasure is a recognition and longing for perfection. This amounts to the foretaste of a pleasure that can never be completely fulfilled, and leads to a mixture of happiness with sadness or nostalgia for what will soon be lost. To men and women of faith, this might be seen as a spiritual encounter with God, involving awe and joy. For example, C.S. Lewis describes an intense feeling of joy whilst gazing into a toy landscape as a child. He attributes the lack of a reason for this joy to a longing for God (Lewis 1955). To others, the experience of beauty might be seen as an indication of how beautiful all things could be, or as Kirwan puts it: The vanishing point of our desire for happiness, (Kirwan 1999, p38). Many of these attributes are present in my own experience of beauty described at the beginning of this essay. The experience came upon me by surprise. It seemed to be triggered by the rising mist but was simultaneously connected to the complete context of the moment. The fact that Pachelbels cannon and gigue was playing on the car radio may have been equally significant, or that the sun was shining, or that this was the beginning of a journey and a new day. Everything appeared to conspire together to

trigger the experience and I cannot say now which was the most important factor. Whatever the cause, the effect was absorbing and inspirational in many of the ways described above. For me it was also spiritual. Finally, although beauty might be defined as a subjective experience it cannot be divorced completely from the object which triggered it. My own experience was a perception of beauty in and through the scene I drove past. I could not describe it without reference to that scene. The connection between the object and the beauty experience is similar to that described by Barthes (1981) for the interpretation of photographs. An image can be read for its literal meaning at an intellectual level, and will occasionally arouse a personal interest or 'studium'. This is what determines whether you like the photograph or not. Even more occasionally, a feature of the photograph will suddenly strike you as particularly touching. Barthes calls this feature the 'punctum', from the latin to prick or punctuate: "This second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefore call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole and also a cast of the dice. A photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)" (Barthes 1981, p27). In my own example, the punctum of the scene was the mist curling slowly upwards from the grass. This was the accident which in context, made the scene beautiful to me. Hence, the elements in a designed object which trigger an experience of beauty may be equivalent to the punctum of a photograph, insofar as they call attention to a new interpretation of the whole object and its context. Without the object there is no interpretation. And without the punctum, there is no experience of beauty.

Beauty as a prize
Returning to the beauty of interactive products we can now see that Hassenzahl was defining this as a property of MP3 player skins rather than as a particular experience triggered by them. Clearly this reflects an ambiguity in the use of the term which was resolved in practice by the way the students in his study interpreted the term on the rating scales they were asked to fill in. Given the context of being asked to make a mark on the scales reflecting the level of beauty they perceived each skin to have, they can be forgiven for interpreting it as a continuous property of the skins and making a judgement accordingly. This judgement seems to reflect a rather modest level of liking or disliking for the skins, rather than any stronger feelings about the presence of beauty itself. Later judgements about the perceived pragmatic and hedonic properties of the skins can be seen as refinements of these preferences, relating to functional and aesthetic properties other than beauty. Either way, the alternative meaning of beauty as an experience remains unexplored. Defining the beauty of interactive products as a rare subjective experience, triggered by some arbitrary product feature suggests a different approach to the subject. This kind of response is clearly something to aspire to in design, but it may not be something we can easily design for. It is more like a prize than a rating, and will vary widely between 'users'. It is fickle but precious, unpredictable but rewarding. You may recognise this from your own experience with interactive products. Like Barthes' experience with photographs, you may find some leave you cold, while others interest you to a greater or lesser extent. However, a rare few may create in you a frisson of delight, admiration humour or fascination; summed up in the internal exclamation

'That's beautiful'. In my own experience, these are usually memorable moments or encounters with new technologies or products. For me they include seeing text projected onto a droplet of water which then splashed into a bowl; watching images displayed on sand disturbed by the movement of my hand, letting music out of a bottle, and selecting something by looking at it. These reactions may not be as intense as other experiences of beauty in the world, but they are equally surprising and genuine. You can't predict them and you can't fake them. From the designers point of view these experiences are the equivalent of beauty prizes or design awards from individual users. In contrast to the prizes or awards given out in real beauty contests or design competitions, they are incontrovertible. Rather than being the most common judgements of beauty by a group of judges, (subject to the whims of politics, fashion and statistics), they are individual encounters with beauty itself. They also come to the designer whether or not he or she entered their designed object for an award. In this sense, individual beauty prizes of this kind are a biproduct of design rather than a central objective of it. Again this contrasts with beauty contests and design competitions where people or products are entered to win the prize.

Implications for design


Beauty then should be treated as a desirable bi-product of design but not its central objective. A similar argument has been proposed for human behaviour in feminist writing about beauty. Wolf (1990) argues that the attainment of popular (male) notions of human beauty is a myth that women need to recognise and reject. A deeper inner beauty may result from this further step of liberation. In the same way, designers should recognise that designing for popular notions of product beauty is distracting. It is like designing products to win awards. Instead they should fix their sights on designing valuable, usable and pleasurable products for customers. This is the way to achieve the best prize of all: a spontaneous experience of real beauty by an individual user. So my first recommendation for designers is to look away from beauty and back to some of the other, more predictable, properties of interactive products such as utility, usability and enjoyment. Designers should still strive to incorporate new aesthetic dimensions of interaction relating to enjoyment into their thinking and practice, as part of the trend towards more holistic and humane design. To this end they should work through different levels of design for any interactive product, as recommended recently by Norman (2004) and Jordan (2000). These include: visceral experience with the product at a sensory level (Norman), leading to a kind of physio-pleasure (Jordan) behavioural experience with the product through interaction and use (Norman), leading to various forms of psycho- and socio-pleasure (Jordan) reflective experience with the product relating to its personal meaning and symbolic value (Norman), leading to a form of ideo-pleasure (Jordan). In fact, Hassenzahl's other properties of MP3 skins relate broadly to these three categories: with hedonic quality stimulation (HQS) relating to a perception of the visceral properties of the skins, pragmatic quality (PQ) relating to their behavioural properties, and hedonic quality identification (HQI) relating to their reflective properties. However, asking users to score these properties on questionnaires is only 5

one way of approaching their understanding and design. Many other methods are available, each with their own advantages and disadvantages (Jordan 1999, Chapter 4). Another way of thinking about this space from a design point of view is to consider how to balance these various qualities in a particular design brief. Young designers typically learn about these relationships through tackling a brief in groups and then using and critiquing each others' designs. This is a more practical approach which involves qualitative comparisons between the properties and a connection to their modification and variation in design. As for beauty, this should remain a background aspiration of designers -a hope that in one of their creations everything might come together to stimulate the experience in users. For those scientists and philosophers still interested in studying beauty and understanding the experience, a first step is to recognise it as a discrete response rather than a continuous judgement. Collecting instances of its occurrence wherever they can be found then seems to be a second step to an empirical study of beauty in natural and man-made experiences. Something like a scaling up of my own thought experiment is required here, to collect beauty stories corresponding to a particular definition of beauty. The beginning of a movement to do this has already started in a discussion of enchantment with technology. Gell (1992) defines the experience of enchantment as a kind of awe and wonder inspired by an object, very similar to that described for the beauty experience by Kant (1790) and Kirwan (1999). McCarthy & Wright (2003) develop this argument with a critical analysis of the enchantments of various interactive products, but stop short of an empirical study of enchantment stories. Such a study might provide more information on the character and equivalence of enchantment and beauty, and the conditions for experiencing them, particularly if it included natural as well as man-made triggers for comparison. This could be useful for design, if the interplays between the objective and subjective conditions for a beauty experience could be teased apart. Until then, (and beyond), we would do well to remember the long history of human fascination and reflection on beauty, and to respect and enjoy its mystery.

References
Armstrong, J. (2004) The secret power of beauty: Why happiness is in the eye of the beholder. London: Allen Lane. Barthes, R. (1981) Camera lucida: Reflections on photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill & Wang. Gell, A. (1992) The technology of enchantment and the enchantment of technology. In J. Coote & A. Shelton (Eds.) Anthropology, art and aesthetics. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Grudin (1990) The computer reaches out: The historical continuity of interface design. Proceedings of CHI '90: 261-268. New York: ACM Press. Hogarth, W. (1753) The analysis of beauty. London. Covent-Garden Journal. Jordan, P.W. (2000) Designing pleasurable products: An introduction to the new human factors. London: Taylor & Francis.

Kant I. (1790). Translated by James Creed Meridith. Oxford 1952. Critique of judgement. Kirwan, J. (1999) Beauty. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lewis C.S. (1955) Surprised by joy: The shape of my early life. Glasgow: William Collins & Sons. McCarthy, J. & Wright, P. (2003) The enchantments of technology. In M.A. Blythe, K. Overbeeke, A.F. Monk & P.C. Wright (eds.) Funology: From usability to enjoyment. London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Norman, D.A. (1988) The psychology of everyday things. New York: Basic Books. Norman, D.A. (2004) Emotional design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things. New York: Basic Books. Wolf, N. (1990) The beauty myth: How images of beauty are used against women. London: Vintage.

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