Progress Towards Designing for Artistic Effects
A strategy in cognitive design is to find artifacts that produce potent think-and-feel experiences and reverse engineer them. The idea is to find the pattern of reusable features and functions that makes them work and apply it to other innovation challenges. For example, gamification or applying game dynamics to non-game design challenges is all the rage.
Another big opportunity is art. Can we artify just as we gamify? The essence of the aesthetic experience has resisted explanation for hundred of years but we are making progress. For example, a new paper in the journal of cognitive psychology presents bottom-up factors (abstraction, form, complexity and symmetry) and top-down factors (novelty and viewer expertise) that can be used to predict art appreciation.
These factors are a far cry from a design pattern but they will surely strongly inform our guesses. As the authors point out:
Though the notion that one could ever “fully” explain or predict an aesthetic preference may appear implausibly reductionist, this review demonstrates that scientific methods have shed significant light on a variety of factors that reliably influence art appreciation, paving the way to a greater understanding of the psychology underlying visual art.
I am interested to hear from readers that have attempted replicate artistic effects in their designs or innovations. What pattern did you use? How did you arrive at it?
