```tracker searchType: frontmatter searchTarget: weight folder: daily notes line: title: Weight Tracker yAxisLabel: weight lineColor: blue ``` - #draft of introduction to Beauty in Use28 Aug 2024 at 13:48:38 - Good design seems like something that we can aesthetically appreciate. There are such things as 'design classics' like the Bialetti coffeepot, the 1994 [[Swiss Railway Clock]], and the iPod. There are also very many examples of bad design –TV remotes cluttered with meaningless buttons, phone chargers with plugs so heavy they slip from the socket. In the [[first half]] of this paper we argue that, despite their focus on *function*, current philosophical accounts of [[design aesthetics]] pay an insufficient amount of attention to experiences of *using* [[designed objects]]. In Section 1 we will [[introduce Carlson]] and Parsons’ theory of [[Functional Beauty]] as a means of explaining how function factors into our perceptual appreciation of good design. However, we will argue that a complete aesthetics of design cannot be entirely perception based. In particular, it cannot accomodate [[the idea]] that “good design is invisible”: a laptop keyboard might look functionally beautiful, but not actually function very well once users begin to type. In Section 2, we will examine Forsey's Kant-inspired view of [[design aesthetics]], on which [[aesthetic appreciation]] of design is fundamentally a matter of making a judgement about how *how perfect it is as regards its function*. Both perception and use can inform these judgements, meaning that [[this approach]] fares better at explaining how [[invisible design]] might be appreciated. However, we argue that upon closer inspection Forsey’s account does not do justice to *experiences of use*. While it might explain how using an object impacts our judgements about well it functions, it seems to leave out experiences of using objects which would seem to be pleasurable in and of themselves. - The aim of this [[first half]] of the paper is to show that user experience has a part to play in [[the aesthetics of design]], the aim of the second is to explain what an aestheticlly pleasing user experience could be. We try to achieve this by addressing a challenge: how can aesthetically [[pleasing interactions]] be differentiated from merely easy ones? - Given that most, possibly all, designed items function to either enable users to do things or to do them more easily, this question arises: shouldn't we always prefer objects that are easiest to use? - We draw on recent philosophical work on [[the aesthetics]] of games and dance, supplemented by work in the phenomenology of agency to find an answer to this.