Visual Aesthetic Quality Research Articles

Environmental Communication and Visual Pollution in the Nigerian City of Port Harcourt: Implications for Design Education and City Planning

Abstract This essay examines the relations between the environment and human-made communications, and their significance to the aesthetic life of a given people. The report considers Nigerian sign-writers, who are indigenous local advertising practitioners trained under a traditional Nigerian apprenticeship system. A pilot study of signwriters’ signs in the city of Port Harcourt was conducted to further examine and problematize this form of communication. The results of this study suggest that pollution in an oil and gas city such as Port Harcourt cannot be limited only to pollutants such as noise, oil spills, urban blight, gas flares, and plumes of smoke (which were excluded from this study). Rather, the visual communication systems created by Nigerian sign-writers have also been identified and classified as environmental visual pollution in Port Harcourt. It is argued here that specific abuses by this form of visual pollution degrade environmental visual order. The essay concludes that, in order to remediate the current tend toward visual pollution in Port Harcourt, environmental design educators should work with and educate cultural planners, city planners, architects, and engineers to enhance the visual aesthetic quality of the built environment in Nigerian cities.

Assessing public preferences for design and environmental attributes of an urban automated transportation system

This study investigates public preferences toward design and environmental aesthetic attributes of an automated transportation system—Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) in an urban setting. The goal of the study was to understand the perceived visual aesthetic quality of the PRT within diverse architectural and natural elements composing the town's main spatial and visual structure and to separate the various components that determine a cumulative visual experience. We utilized human perceptual judgments as indicators of visual aesthetic quality, and referred to a psychophysical method to assess the perceived visual aesthetic quality of the scenes. Perceptions were captured using a rank ordering process of most and least preferred scenes on presented panels and responses were analyzed using correlation and regression statistical techniques. Results indicate that specific design attributes such as pillar shape or size, and type of fascia, did not emerge as significantly influencing public perception, while the relationship between automated structure and vehicular infrastructure, and the position of the observer are particularly important. Overall findings indicate that studies conducted on automated transportation should consider the effect of context on the perception of the system. The findings improve our understanding of visual strengths and weaknesses of automated transportation structures within the urban environment and can be useful in the planning for similar transportation systems.

Translating experience

This paper describes research investigating the significance of physical experience and materiality in creative digital visual art and design practice. Findings are presented from a recent phenomenological study, which indicates the ways in which memory of lived experience informs creative cognition and feeds the imagination. The importance of physical engagement with the world, through the senses, enables emotional expression to be made in artworks that can be perceived by both artist and audience. Digital creativity support tools have been found, in this research, to lack interfaces that facilitate the translation of these visual aesthetic qualities in the virtual representation. Hand use and the sense of touch stimulate novel ideas and enable practitioners to break from fixated thinking when working with digital design tools. Examples of artworks are presented that illustrate ways in which artists, working with digital technology, make use of physical experience to inform visual ideas and innovate design solutions. Case study research is described that illuminates the ways in which memory of physical bodily experience and the time related factors involved in making by hand are crucial within the creative process. Findings from this research are presented that reveal the importance of physical interaction with the world when working creatively with digital design tools.

“MASSIVE STRUCTURE” OR “SPACIOUS NATURALNESS”? AESTHETIC CHOICES IN THE WANG FAMILIES' GARDENS IN TAICANG

INTRODUCTIONIt is generally accepted that gardens were an important vehicle for self-representation and self-expression among elite men in early modern China (Clunas 1996). Scholars have discussed how such garden-owners could situate themselves within the Chinese cultural and particularly literary tradition by the adroit use of names and inscriptions incorporating classical allusions (Makeham 1998). However, less has been written on precisely how the visual aesthetic qualities of a garden could reflect the owner's cultural and aesthetic preferences. This paper is an attempt to do this for specific gardens owned by Wang Shizhen<inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="splitsection2_in1.tif"/> (zi <inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="splitsection2_in2.tif"/> Yuanmei <inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="splitsection2_in3.tif"/>, hao <inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="splitsection2_in4.tif"/> Fengzhou <inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="splitsection2_in5.tif"/>, Yanzhou shanren <inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="splitsection2_in6.tif"/>, 1526–1590), his son Wang Shiqi <inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="splitsection2_in7.tif"/> (zi Jiongbo <inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="splitsection2_in8.tif"/>, b. 1554, jinshi <inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="splitsection2_in9.tif"/> 1589), his friend Wang Xijue <inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="splitsection2_in10.tif"/> (zi Yuanyu <inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="splitsection2_in11.tif"/>, hao Jingshi <inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="splitsection2_in12.tif"/>, 1534–1611), and Wang Xijue's grandson Wang Shimin <inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="splitsection2_in13.tif"/> (zi Xunzhi <inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="splitsection2_in14.tif"/>, hao Yanke <inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="splitsection2_in15.tif"/> 1592–1680); I will place them in the immediate context of gardens owned by these two Wang families in Taicang <inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="splitsection2_in16.tif"/>, Suzhou <inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="splitsection2_in17.tif"/> prefecture, and also in the wider context of Jiangnan <inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="splitsection2_in18.tif"/> garden culture in the late Ming.

Relationship between landscape visual attributes and spatial pattern indices: A test study in Mediterranean-climate landscapes

The analysis of the relationships between landscape visual quality and landscape structural properties is an active area of environmental perception research. The aim of this study was to determine the relationship between landscape spatial pattern and the rating of visual aesthetic quality. Eight landscape photographs were evaluated for 11 visual attributes by 98 respondents. The scores obtained for these 11 attributes were subjected to principal components analysis in order to summarize the qualities used by the respondents and thus determine their visual preferences. For each photograph, three window sizes were defined (with respect to a landcover map) to cover the different areas corresponding to the visual field (foreground, mid-ground and background). The landscape spatial structure for each window was analyzed using spatial metrics. The correlation between each dimension and the spatial pattern indices of the landscape were then calculated. Positive correlations were obtained between visual aesthetic quality and a number of landscape pattern indices. The results suggest that landscape heterogeneity might be an important factor in determining visual aesthetic quality.

Visual aesthetic quality of Northern Ontario's forested shorelines.

Only a few empirical studies on forest aesthetics have adopted a water-based perspective for observers and have investigated the perceived visual quality of forested shorelines. In forested environments with many lakes, such as the boreal forest in the Canadian Shield, individuals have greater exposure to forests from water-based rather than in-stand vantage points. This study employed the psychophysical research direction to explore the relationships between scenic beauty and biophysical characteristics of the forested shorelines in the boreal forests. Two model forms were tested. One model related the variation of shoreline forest aesthetic evaluations of near-vista views (140 m offshore) to a set of forest mensuration data. Tree size, tree mortality, conifer shrubs, tree density, amount of hardwood, and slope explained 60.2% of the variance in scenic beauty between the study sites. A second model was calibrated to test the relationship between an already existing ecosystem vegetation classification system and the aesthetic evaluations of the same forested shorelines. When the ecosystem classification was simplified to eight groups, the model explained 48.5% of variance. These models suggest that the psychophysical approach to studying aesthetics can be applied successfully to near-vista evaluations of scenic beauty. The finding that a forest ecosystem classification system is highly related to scenic beauty suggests that, at least in the boreal forest, managers can reasonably estimate the scenic beauty of forested shoreline environments from an ecosystem classification, with little need for intensive data on these sites.

Multisensory Integration of Visual, Tactile, and Olfactory Aesthetic Cues of Appearance

Integration of olfactory, visual, and tactile aesthetic cues of appearance in the impression formation process was examined. Eighty-nine female college students, each responding to three fragrances, rated 30 fabric swatches on 7-point Likert-type scales as to the fabrics' likeliness to be worn by someone who prefers to wear a particular fragrance. Rank orders of fabrics for the two fragrances with similar olfactory structures were associated (p &lt;. 05) whereas rank orders of fabrics for two pairs of fragrances with dissimilar structures were not associated (p &gt; .05) according to Spearman correlations, suggesting multisensory integration of appearance cues. A priori visual and tactile aesthetic qualities of fabrics ranked high or low for each fragrance were examined for similarities. Similarities of visual and tactile qualities were found within each group of fabrics for each fragrance, suggesting multisensory integration of appearance cues on an aesthetic level.

Perception and recall of aesthetic quality in a familiar environment

Two experiments were conducted to investigate judgments of aesthetic quality in a familiar environment. In Experiment 1 students toured a college campus and the adjacent commercial district and made magnitude estimates of the composite, visual, and auditory aesthetic quality at various locations. Subjects in Experiment 2 made the same set of judgments from memory; i.e., using brief descriptions of the locations as stimuli. Results from the two experiments were highly correlated, suggesting that subjects have detailed mental representations of their immediate aesthetic environment. In both experiments the relative ratings of locations were stable across the seasons of the year. Composite and visual ratings were practically identical, whereas auditory ratings tended to be lower.