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Aesthetics and ID
Running head: AESTHETICS AND ID
Aesthetics: Finding the Art in Instructional Design
Shawn Sullivan
George Mason University
Instructional Technology
Instructional Design Immersion Program
Abstract
As disparate categories of technology-based learning environments continue to emerge, there has been some research which suggests that the visual aesthetics of instructional multimedia-based interfaces is a strong determinant of users’ satisfaction and pleasure. However, the lack of appropriate concepts, measures and uses of aesthetics intertwined in instructional design may severely constrain future progression in the development of aesthetics within the field of instructional design. This paper examines the history of aesthetics and its involvement in the expanding area of instructional design and development.
An Introduction to Aesthetics
What is beauty? What is art? How do we define these concepts? These are questions that have been contemplated for centuries. Answering these questions formulate the framework of the field of aesthetics. Aesthetics, as defined by The Philosopher’s Dictionary, is “the philosophical study of art, of our reactions to it, and of similar reactions to things that are not works of art” (Martin, 1994, p.16).
During the time of ancient Greece, art was considered to be any action requiring a degree of skill like sculpting a statue, building a house, leading an army or using oratory expertise to win an argument. Skills, such as these, involved an understanding of rules, so there could be no art without an appreciation of those fundamental rules of discipline. In contrast, neither the ancient Greeks nor the Scholastics considered poetry an art because it relied on inspiration and as a result was not art. Therefore it was the application of skill and the mastery of the associated rules that gave a much broader definition of art than we use today (Gordon, 1997).
Also during this period, a distinction was made between those arts that required mental effort and those that required physical effort in addition to the intellectual. Those only involving intellectual effort were considered the liberal arts. In the Middle Ages, a liberal arts education was divided into grammar, rhetoric and logic, known as the trivium ("the three ways"), precursors to the more advanced fields of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music, called the quadrivium ("the four ways") (Lamarque, 2003). From this list, only music is what we would today consider an art. However, in those days, music was the study of harmony and not the contextualized body of work we think of today.
Greek philosophers, Plato an Aristotle, recognized the importance of aesthetics, and regarded architecture, drama, music and poetry as fundamental societal foundations. Poetry had remained separate from the arts until 1549, when the first Italian translation of Aristotle's Poetics was completed and people became persuaded by the arguments and the explanations of the rules of tragedies. This classic notion of art as the imitation of nature was formulated by Plato and developed by Aristotle in his Poetics (Gordon, 1997). Plato viewed beauty as a combination of proportion, harmony and unity. Conversely, Aristotle saw beauty as order, symmetry and definiteness (Martin, 1994).
The philosophical field of modern aesthetics began in the eighteenth century. At that time, taste, imagination, natural beauty, and imitation came to be recognized as the fundamental topics in aesthetics. Francis Hutcheson appears to have been the first person to place the problem of aesthetic judgment among the central questions of epistemology. How can we know that something is beautiful? What guides our judgment and what validates it? His answer to these questions was that aesthetic judgments are perceptual and take their influence from a sense that is common to all who construct aesthetic judgments (Lamarque, 2003). In An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), Hutcheson explained: “The origin of our perceptions of beauty and harmony is justly called a ‘sense' because it involves no intellectual element, no reflection on principles and causes” (Bishop, 1996).
Such a statement would have been strongly renounced by Hutcheson's contemporary Alexander Baumgarten, who introduced the modern idea of aesthetics in his Reflections on Poetry. He had inherited a tradition from his predecessors that dismissed the senses and the imagination as incapable of providing genuine cognitive consideration of objects and always standing to be corrected and replaced by rational reflection (Bishop, 1996). Consequently, Baumgarten identified poetry as cognitive; providing insight into the world that could not be conveyed in any other way. Poetic insights were aesthetic and for this reason instilled with the unique nature of sensory and imaginative experience. Baumgarten held that the aesthetic value of a poem was inherent in the virtual prevalence of clarity over confusion. As a result, his theory of the value of art was considered cognitive (Gordon, 1997).
Modern thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, F. W. Schelling, Benedetto Croce, and Ernst Cassirer emphasized the creative and symbolic aspects of art. The major problem in aesthetics concerned the nature of the beautiful and the two basic approaches to the dilemma of beauty. The objective, which asserted that beauty, is inherent in the object and that judgments concerning it have objective validity, and the subjective which tended to identify the beautiful with that which pleases the onlooker. Outstanding defenders of the objective position were Plato, Aristotle, and G. E. Lessing, and of the subjective position, Edmund Burke and David Hume (Gordon, 1997).
Of considerable importance, in his Critique of Judgment, Kant reconciled the two approaches by showing that aesthetic judgment had universal validity despite its subjective nature. Kant argued that such aesthetic judgments of taste must have four key distinguishing features. First, aesthetic judgments must be disinterested, meaning that we take pleasure in something because we judge it beautiful, rather than judging it beautiful because we find it pleasurable. Second, such judgments are universal. Third, judgments are necessary. This means that it is a fundamental part of judgment to expect others to agree. For example, the idea of beauty being in the eye of the beholder is counter to the expectation of judgment. Instead, aesthetic judgments are debated and argued, particularly about works of art, with the belief that such debates and arguments will accomplish something. Fourth, through aesthetic judgments, beautiful objects appear to be final without end. An object's purpose is the concept according to which it was made or designed (Wenzel, 2005).
This has suggested to critics and philosophers that art is not so much an object of sensory experience as an instrument of knowledge. Specifically, art appears to have the power to represent reality and to express emotion, and some argue that it is through appreciating the properties of representation and expression that we recognize the meaning of art (Wenzel, 2005).
The most important function of expression in modern aesthetics is to describe those aspects and dimensions of artistic meaning that seem not to fall within the bounds of representation, because they involve no clear reference to an independent subject matter in terms appropriate to representation. Therefore, it is widely recognized that abstract art forms such as music, abstract painting and architecture may contain meaningful declarations with a term such as expression employed so as to describe their elusive meanings. Music, in particular, is often said to be an expression of emotion and it achieves much of its significance from that explanation. Expression in such a case is unlike representation, according to many philosophers, in that it involves no descriptive component. An expression of happiness does not describe happiness but presents it with a face or a gesture (Gordon, 1997).
Research in Aesthetics
Artists craft works of art, which reflect the skills, knowledge and personalities of their creators, with the art succeeding or failing in realizing the artist’s aims. Works of art can be interpreted in different ways. They can be understood, misunderstood, subjected to analysis, and praised or criticized. Although there are many kinds of value that works of art possess, their distinctive significance is their artistic value. The nature of a work of art provides it with a greater or lesser degree of this unique artistic value (Berghoff, Borgmann, & Parr, 2005).
For that reason, the most elemental question about art remains to be: What is art? Is it possible to differentiate art from non-art forms by means of an explanation? Are the arts too loosely related to one another for them to possess a real meaning that can be captured in a single definition? Although it seems that few people have an answer to the question of the ontological status of the work of art, some pertinent considerations are formed within the common sense understanding of works of art and the practice in dealing with them (Currie, 1989). Works of art are thought of as things created at a certain time through the imaginative and creative acts of an artist, composer, or author. Once created, the work of art is normally thought of as established and enduring public entity that may be seen, heard, or read by a number of diverse people who may have legitimate arguments about the work (Wolterstorff, 1980).
What kinds of understanding are involved in artistic appreciation, and must an accepted interpretation of a work be compatible with any other accepted interpretation? Rather than trying to make works of art fit into the ready-made categories, attempts to determine the categories that would really be suitable for works of art through ordinary beliefs and practices must be afforded (Wolterstorff, 1980).
Conventional examinations of works of art, aesthetics and design refer to traditionally different understandings of creative activity. An aesthetic criterion, applied to the arts, refers to the universality of the nature of beauty. Conversely, the basis of design is that an object is created for the benefit of potential users and is aimed at satisfying a desire, need or necessity. The relationship between art and design is always fluid because it encompasses both elements (Neumann, 2005).
Most of what represents software art today is considered media art. It is concerned with the formulation of aesthetic modes of expression, with the expansion of the artistic field, and with the articulation of the shifting relationships of human and medium, or human and machine (Kertz-Welzel, 2005). Some in the software field believe software programming will, not unlike photography, video and the Internet, move from a status of innovation to being one more medium which artists can make use of according to their individual tastes, expressive needs and technical talents. A software art exhibition will then make as much and as little sense as an exhibition dedicated to photographs, or to video art (Littler, 2005).
The reflection of the aesthetic and cultural aspects of software are crucial gestures of software art, and it remains to be discussed whether it would be necessary to differentiate between art, critique and speculation, or whether such differentiation is not required (Dickey, 2005).
Digital technology has marshaled in a new era for the acquisition and integration of widely divergent material, whether visual or text. A key factor in labor utilizing digital technology involves the digitalization of a wide range of inputs into the ordinary material of binary information. It is possible for the visual artist, writer, designer, filmmaker, and musician to sit down in front of the same device to manipulate this common material with the purpose of producing work. The fact that particular processes such as, selecting, copying, pasting and running filters are now common practices for all these individual crafts is just the tip of a exceedingly integrative and creative synthesis of forms (Radford, 2004). In addition, digital technology represents not only a tool for mixing art of various forms it is also a new form of mass communication. In this respect the tool itself is an integral part of a global mediated environment from which artists can draw inspiration, as well as, source material. The fluidity of a visual image in this environment is unprecedented and far exceeds the potential when it was first speculated (Taylor, Salces, & Duffy, 2005).
Aesthetics and Instructional Design
Despite its relevance to human thought and practice, aesthetics, in large part, has played an insignificant role in human–computer interaction research. Increasingly, however, researchers attempt to provide a sense of balance between the traditional concerns of human–computer interaction and considerations of aesthetics. As a consequence, current examination suggests that the visual aesthetics of computer interfaces is a strong determinant of users’ satisfaction and pleasure (Dickey, 2005).
An instructional interface can be thought of as elements that assist the user or the learner, in the task of learning. In a technology-based training environment, instructional interface elements are those that are specifically designed to facilitate access to, and participation in, instruction and instructional support. Although the term instructional interface seems to depict an interaction with a computer system, instructional interfaces can also be paper or product based as well. General forms of instructional interfaces include technical manuals, job-aids, online support systems for software applications, or pages of a web site (Lee & Boling, 1999).
While instructional designers are attempting to understand how many lines of text they are allowed to have or what pictures can grab attention, a designer with more graphical knowledge is determining what font best conveys the desired meaning or which picture and in what style best coincides with a desired response. They are learning such visual principles as: repetition, variety, rhythm, balance, emphasis, economy and the elements of design that can manipulate these principles: line, shape and form, space, texture, value, color, and perspective. If a good instructional designer must know the fundamental processes, requisites and have more experience with graphic tools in order to make sure that a program functions well, it would be in the best interest of the instructional designer to have a strong understanding of graphic design terms and the creative and aesthetic processes. This is particularly important because the mode of communication in developing multimedia-based instructional programs is primarily visual (Haag & Snetsigner, 1993).
While research seeks to study the aesthetic aspects of human–computer interaction and to find balance between usability and aesthetic considerations, Jason Gait was among the first to raise this issue in 1985. Gait asserted that the more interesting interfaces were, the larger the increase in user excitement and their ability to sustain their interest (Gait, 1985). This outcome remained largely unrecognized in the human–computer interaction community for over a decade. However, in recent years this previously neglected subject has received immense awareness and coverage. Due to advancements in technology, close attention has been paid to the visual aesthetics of computer interface design. This suggests that aesthetics is a strong determinant of pleasure experienced by the user during interaction (Lee & Boling, 1999).