Beauty from a design perspective

Anthropologist Carolyn Bloomer defines beauty in terms of optimal closure. Some objects or experiences can seem so perfect, she says, that they leave no room in the imagination for anything better. “If we think of the human mind as a pattern-making, pattern-seeking system, then optimal closure is what satisfies this drive. Beauty can be experienced in almost any aspect of human life—a nail driven perfectly into wood, onions sautéed to perfection, dancing in perfect synchronization to music. Optimal closure gives an object or an activity its greatest power, for it admits of no extraneous perceptions.” ”

The personal definition of aesthetics according to Marty Neumeier is this: “The study of sensory and emotive values for the purpose of appreciating and creating beauty. Aesthetic principles, also called formal qualities, are the tools we use to give form to the objects of design. These include concepts such as shape, line, rhythm, contrast, texture, and so forth, which can be employed in endless combinations. There are no hard and fast rules for using aesthetic tools. They only need to make the object “more of what it wants to be” instead of merely more.”

Many creative people think that there are no universal rules for creating beauty, and that anyone who says there are can’t be a real artist. There’s some truth in this, because invention consists of generating new rules rather than following old ones.

How RetinaDesign jewelry gains an elevated level of beauty by addition of uniqueness and meaning

Looking at the true value and beauty of jewelry, mass products oftentimes do contain important factors of beauty, namely

• the content: a ring has informational or functional value, being recognized as a mere impersonal fashion accessory (generic status symbol) or more personal symbol of belonging (to 1 or more persons: marital vs. tribal status).
• its form: the shape, contrast and texture can add to its perception to be beautiful, while depending a lot on individual taste (the eye of the beholder).

These two factors alone often already allow for a good aesthetic experience.

However, there’s an essential third claim. The plane of personal associations  – they can include memories, understandings, cultural norms,  tribal allegiances and personal aspirations, that we bring to our experiences.

When we experience content and form through the lense of our associations, we finally create meaning.

In fact for most people, association is the most powerful determinant of beauty.

Personal associations therefore are usually the reasons certain jewelry items matter to us (the “emotional value” of a watch you got from your father, a necklace your grandmother had already worn). For most people it’s the plane of this kind of experience that’s easiest to appreciate and the most emotionally charged.

Personalization in general has therefore been recognized in most industries as a successful value-adding factor. Specifically, a few players in the jewelry industry have realized this and try to monetarize this principle by offering jewelry that displays names (personal but not  unique and not beautiful), finger prints (quite unique but not beautiful) or locations (where you met, first kissed, got engaged etc.). These items can be customized relatively easy and sold at low prices due to a certain degree of automation and the choice of non-precious metals. The meaning that is applied here is an external factor (location), which for some customers makes it personal, yet importantly: not unique. The principle of this geo-code implies that eventually there will be many identical items (e.g. how many couples have emotional associations with the Eiffel tower?).

To reach the ultimate level of personal uniqueness, we have to add another level: an internal factor that cannot be copied.

The RetinaCode® actually has exactly what it takes: It chooses an internal factor for maximal personal association, namely a piece of a person’s eye signature, which due to the non-genetic determination of its shape, differs even among identical twins – hence identical retina-based symbols of love, that contain the patterns of two lovers’ retinas are impossible by definition. This guarantees uniqueness while maximizing the personal association factor.

Personalization oftentimes is expensive, complicated and time-consuming – three killers of modern profitable business concepts that need to be scalable.

Most business concepts nowadays choose one of two models that either:

• dispense with formal beauty and just create things that people can connect with on a meaning level.
• focus on formal beauty resulting in mass products due to the absence of personal meaning and therefore these products are short-lived without long-term satisfaction.

Model no. 1 is defined as kitsch: torrents of tribal identifiers, such as logo products and trendy personal electronics that help us fit into the groups of our choice. The satisfaction we get from these objects is often shallow. Eventually we wonder if there might be something more.

Model no. 2 is economically more successful but it leads to huge malls, online giants like Amazon but also more and more pedestrian zones that look the same in every city. They all add to a general unhappiness, being swamped by mass products enhancing a feeling of meaninglessness so we need more short-term dopamine experiences buying more goods all the time.

Ways out of the dilemma

With a little effort and thoughtfulness, we can begin to appreciate beauty for its formal qualities, apart from its content and our personal associations with it. We can marvel at everyday things, like the asymmetrical placement of an upper story window, or the roughness of chipped paint on a child’s toy, or the sound of a delicate cymbal floating over a gruff bass line. We can take delight in the shape of certain phrases or the unresolved contrast of bitter and sweet or we can find fascination in the symmetry of an equation.

At this point the realm of aesthetics opens up to us. We’re able to escape the narrow confines of personal meaning and embrace the beauty that’s hidden everywhere. We move out of the house and into the world. We start to demand more from the things we buy, the people we take up with, the experiences we give ourselves. Using aesthetics, we learn to separate the authentic from the fake, the pure from the polluted, the courageous from the timid. In short, we develop good taste.

The benefits of good taste

Sometimes, we wonder, why so many adults cant see aesthetic differences and don’t have an adequate framework for beauty.

Good taste is the promise and the payoff of aesthetics. And like beauty, good taste can’t be bought. It’s not a manual you can memorize or an attitude you can adopt.

It’s not a synonym for snobbishness, because snobbishness isn’t, well, in good taste. Good taste has long been considered a quality that existed mostly in the eye of the beholder. The Romans had a saying for it: “De gustibus non est disputandum,” or “About taste there’s no argument.” But this isn’t completely true. While there’s a wide range of what might be considered good taste, it doesn’t stretch on forever. There’s such a thing as bad taste, too, and most of us know it when we see it.

Using a special model in his book “Metaskills”, Marty Neumeier discusses the coexistence of personal associations (the eye of the beholder) with formal qualities (the eye of the educated beholder) when appreciating aesthetics. He argues:

“The education of the eye and other senses is what separates those with good taste from those with ordinary or bad taste. This is not snobbishness. It’s a recognition that you have to work to develop good taste and it’s mostly in the area of understanding formal principles.”

While I do agree in principle, I believe that the understanding of these formal principles doesn’t always need traditional learning, as I have come across people that seem to have a more inherent understanding about these beauty concepts than others. However, for the perception and understanding of beauty in categories that might be novel to the eye of the beholder, most of us will definitely benefit from actively studying aesthetic concepts, as the psychologist Howard Gardner writes about it in his book Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed: “All young people will acquire and exhibit aesthetic preferences. But only those who are exposed to a range of works of art, who observe how these works of art are produced, who understand something about the artist behind the works, and who encounter thoughtful discussion of issues of craft and taste are likely to develop an aesthetic sense that goes beyond schlock or transcends what happens to be most popular among peers at the moment.” In other words, good taste is learned through conscious effort.