Weißes Leinen

Am Freitag, 21. Dezember 2012 um 19.00 Uhr findet die Eröffnung der Ausstellung „Weißes Leinen“ von Frank Josten statt. Frank ist ein Freund unserer Arbeitsgruppe und fertigt unter anderem Illustrationen und Storyboards für verschiedene unserer Projekte an. Wir freuen uns auf die Ausstellung in der Werkstatt Bleichhäuschen in Rheda-Wiedenbrück.

User-Experience from an Inference Perspective

van Schaik, P., Hassenzahl, M., & Ling, J. (2012). User-Experience from an Inference Perspective. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 19(2), 1–25. doi:10.1145/2240156.2240159

Everything can be beautiful

I argue that everything can be beautiful … as long as somebody with authority claims it to be.

To make something beautiful is thus not about curves versus rectangles, saturation, hue, symmetry, proportions, or any other hidden “aesthetic code.” To make something beautiful is about deciding what to make, exposing people to it, and claiming with authority that it is beautiful. In this respect beauty is more or less constructed socially. There are no Platonic ideals, waiting to be uncovered. There are ideals waiting to be fashioned, and there is intersubjective agreement to be reached by familiarity and authority.

For design this is freedom and burden at the same time. Although we can establish everything as beautiful—even streamlined toasters—we become more and more aware of the responsibility this implies. It was us and not any evolutionary aesthetic code that established the wasp waist, subjecting women to cracked and deformed ribs, weakened abdominal muscles, and deformed and dislocated internal organs. Was Rubens just depicting the beauty ideal of his time, or was he actually setting it to voluptuous, stout, and luxuriant? Is it some hard-wired evolutionary preference or us who decided to create a beauty ideal in cars that look as if they run on chummy pedestrians rather than on gasoline

Do you agree?

Hassenzahl, M. (2012). Everything can be beautiful. interactions, 19(4), 60. doi:10.1145/2212877.2212892

The mysteries of beauty

Beauty – a topic always good for serious research and heated debates, facts and fiction. Interaction-design.org further extends their wonderful encyclopedia with a chapter by Noam Tractinsky on “Aesthetics in HCI”. Here is a sneaky preview …

The dilemma of the hedonic – Appreciated, but hard to justify

Diefenbach, S. and Hassenzahl, M. (2011). The dilemma of the hedonic – appreciated, but hard to justify. Interacting with Computers.

Kongress der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Psychologie

Sarah Diefenbach hält am Mittwoch, den 29. September, 8:30 Uhr einen Vortrag zum Thema “Usability versus Schönheit. Was wiegt schwerer für Produktwahl und Erleben?” in  der Arbeitsgruppe “Mensch-Maschine Interaktion I: Usability und User Experience”.

The Inference of Perceived Usability From Beauty

Hassenzahl, M. and Monk, A. (2010). The inference of perceived usability from beauty. Human-Computer Interaction, 25(3):235-260.

Aesthetics in interactive products: Correlates and consequences of beauty

Hassenzahl, M. (2008). Aesthetics in interactive products: Correlates and consequences of beauty. In Schifferstein, H. N. and Hekkert, P., editors, Product Experience, chapter 11, pages 287-302. Elsevier.

The “Beauty Dilemma”

Diefenbach, S. and Hassenzahl, M. (2009). The “beauty dilemma”: Beauty is valued but discounted in product choice. In Proceedings of the CHI 09 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 1419-1426. ACM.