Of course attractive products are valued if the function and purpose is fullfilled, but very often “stylish” products conciously undo default behaviours and user expectations with “new and attractive” ways of doing user interfaces – L

Sorry, this is just rubbish. Of course form still follows function. If the iMac, Volkswagen Beetle etc didn’t function exceptionally well, they’d have been a flop.

The notion that people value aesthetics more now than they did then is a misnoma. People can afford aesthetics now, where before this was a luxury. As the population becomes more affluent and companies cotton on to the fact that people have always wanted aesthetics, goods become cheaper and more aesthetic.

People in poorer countries (or westerners earlier this century) couldn’t care less about aesthetics. If something works, and they can afford it, then that’s enough for them. If aesthetic goods were cheap enough, they’d have those instead, because the desire for beauty and individuality is something that runs deeper than trend. It roots in the way humans value themselves. This isn’t transient, in my opinion.

This is a pretty shallow dismissal of “poorer countries”, which themselves have exquisitely refined senses of taste. They just happen to be totally different then yours.

Most of this book summary strikes me as a big “so what.” I guess that Postrel’s not really writing for an audience that’s been engaged with these issues for some time. Frankly, it sounds like an overlong article in ID or Wired. And incidently, book reviews are far more useful if the reviewer has a point of view about the book, rather than just restating its argument. Is there nothing worth criticizing in Postrel?

One of the things I care a lot about is how projects feel. In the days of kiosk/cd-rom design we were able to carefully craft how inetractive objects felt, the subtle feedback that could be offered to communicate so much to the user. The very nature of the early web took so much out of the control of the designer and put it under the ‘control’ of the browser and the chaos of the unpredictable internet.

Before the web became the main platform for interactive media we could create magic at that moment the audience made a choice, offering many levels of response. Just the right sound at the right moment, just the right transition that told the story of how the state was changing, just the right delay so that meaning registered. We could make something *feel* beautiful, responsive, solid.

Suddenly with the web this was no loonger possible — the moment the audience made a choice the browser took over and offered an empty page and a long wait. And whether or not the link would work or fail, the first seconds felt the same. Apprehension…

The flimsy feel and fickle behaviour of the early web made most aesthetic concerns a waste of designer, client and audience bandwidth. This is no longer the case.

Sorry, but this was silly too. I never saw a magic cd-rom nor ever met a person who claimed to. Whatever magic you are talking about is something only designers care about. On the contrary, people describe to me the “magical” properties of the internet on a daily basis, and this has never been about aesthetics but almost always about some interaction with another person or service.

Which is where I believe aesthetics come in. As social animals I believe that humans consider the question “how will having this make me look” far more than “how will having this make me feel.”

That is why people don’t care what web sites look like, but the cut of their clothes or the shape of their car is a matter of profound concern.

Sure, we had our share of misfires where the final result was less than we imagined, and a few things that just did not work right, but we made many successful pieces. A project that we made with the Royal Ontario Museum in 1993, Birdsong, is still entertaining and educating museumgoers ten years later.

Some of our work created genuine excitement among the people who were exposed to it. Certainly we had the lustre of newness working for us, but I’m not pulling your leg or embellishing the truth when I say that there were moments of magic.

“To keep things in perspective Postrel is quick to point out that ‘form has its own power and worth, but it does not inevitably trump content.’”

These two quotes illustrate how discussions of aesthetics can oscillate between different fundamental definitions if the term. If aesthetics is the way we communicate through the senses, then one might rhetorically ask, how else do we communicate? Thus aesthetics assumes a large and substantial field of inquiry into communication and signification; in fact, it becomes equivalent to a field that would yoke semiotics and epistemology.

But if aesthetics is reduced merely to packaging and form, then it can be easily separated from “content” and falls back into the very different notional arena of taste and beauty, where the stakes are less compelling than her argument might at first appear.