Aesthetic Values in Technology and Engineering Design

Abstract

Aesthetic values are difficult to define and to identify in engineering activities for several reasons. One reason is that the professional aesthetics discourse is narrowly focused on the fine arts including literature, such that, particularly for many Anglo-Saxon aestheticists, aesthetics has become equivalent to the study of the fine arts or art criticism. Unfortunately, that makes their conceptual apparatus largely inappropriate for other fields of aesthetics, including engineering aesthetics. Another reason is that scientists and engineers frequently use terms such as “beautiful”, which would otherwise be typical indicators of aesthetic appreciation, to express epistemic or functional approval or to popularize their activity to a broader public. It is useful therefore to start with a broad concept of aesthetic values by considering any values that are not of epistemic, functional, or ethical nature. The remaining values typically include familiar aesthetic values such as beauty, elegance, harmony (non-epistemic), simplicity and clarity, and familiarity, as well their opposites on which aesthetic disapproval is based. In addition, something can aesthetically please or displease by resemblance to something else that pleases or displeases for aesthetic reasons only, which is typically expressed by analogies or metaphors and which sometimes leads to the formation of aesthetic styles. Whenever such aesthetic values contribute to preferences in engineering decisions, there is evidence that they inform the engineering activity.