Designing Aesthetic Experiences for the Cultural Sustainability of Ecological Health

Abstract

Ensuring human wellbeing and promoting ecological health are two central objectives in contemporary landscape architecture practice and adaption to climate change. Cognitive sciences recognize that affect and emotion play a critical role in human decision-making. This article describes how aesthetic experiences could affect decisions that support or undermine ecological health. While the wellbeing benefits of pleasant landscape experiences have been demonstrated empirically, aesthetic experiences may or may not promote ecological health. The question of how to better align the two remains under debate and investigation. Building on the concept of cultural sustainability, this article elucidates how aesthetic experiences can be used in design tactics to encourage societal acceptance for highly functioning ecosystems that otherwise may be destroyed or resisted for their unappealing or unfamiliar appearance. With examples from China and the United States, this article illuminates how fine-scale, immediately noticeable landscape characteristics, such as “cues to care,” can change perceptual and affective responses to promote ecological health. This article invites readers to reflect on what role aesthetic experiences may play in conserving, restoring, and creating ecologically sound landscapes as we face new challenges in the urban era of climate change, and how design can help construct aesthetic experiences with immediately noticeable landscape characteristics.