Hello, my name is Paul Haimes, and I'm currently an associate professor at Ritsumeikan University
in Japan. Before I begin, I just want to briefly mention that this paper is entirely theoretical.
I thought I should let you know in advance because basically there's no exciting prototype to show.
But since ALT CHI is about questioning existing practices and methodologies, I felt that this was
an appropriate venue for publishing this work. And due to the brevity of this presentation, I'm only
presenting a small portion of what I discuss in the paper. It's basically about the ontology
of aesthetics in HCI. If this is a topic of interest to you, I suggest reading the full paper.
First of all, I should say that Tractinsky has been very important in bringing aesthetics to
the attention of HCI. In the late 1990s, he played a very important role in doing that.
But one of the problems with how HCI approaches aesthetics is it tends to rely on
a very simplistic definition of it, exemplified here by the reference to the American Heritage
Dictionary's definition of aesthetics as 'an artistically beautiful or pleasing appearance'.
Now, that is a part of what aesthetics is, but it ignores how philosophy approaches
aesthetics. And unfortunately, HCI's discourse completely ignores the philosophical tradition,
although there are a few very notable exceptions to that which I refer to in the paper.
The term aesthetics has been around for a few-hundred years,
but has its roots in conversations between Plato and Aristotle regarding the nature of beauty,
and it now considers beauty across basically all cultures. In the last couple of centuries art
was the main focus. And that made it, actually, a little bit difficult to distinguish it from
the philosophy of art. But in the late 20th century, environmental aesthetics and everyday
aesthetics became a couple of the more prominent areas of interest. And this broadened the scope
of what aesthetics considered; and everyday aesthetics in particular is quite relevant to HCI.
So some of the characteristics of everyday aesthetics.
They are utilitarian in nature, they involve multi sensory interactions, and they lack
determinate boundaries. So context of use is important. They lack permanence.
And of course, that's very relevant to HCI because most of us work [by] prototyping. And, you know,
those prototypes don't last very long. And they lack meaning when compared to artworks.
So I think all of these aspects are quite relevant to HCI.
And I want to briefly mention Paul Fishwick's work in aesthetic computing. I think it's
the closest that anyone's gotten to
an approach to aesthetics that's relevant to HCI. Unfortunately, he has shifted his focus to
working with formal languages in aesthetics, which is not quite relevant to HCI.
But one important thing that he did do was point out that art categorizations are very useful
for computing aesthetics. And also the idea of embodiment. So aesthetics as embodied experience.
What I've done with my framework for aesthetics in HCI is to combine a couple of very prominent
art categorizations from the late 20th century,
combined those with the characteristics of everyday aesthetics, and try to frame them
in a way that highlights embodiment and present them, hopefully, in a way that makes sense to
those of us who work in HCI. But the main message here is that basically, aesthetics is as much
about our experience as it is the object itself. And that's the main message from this research.