Smooth and hard or beautiful and elegant?
Subtitle
Experts’ conceptual structure of the aesthetics of materials
Publication date
2022-05-20
Document type
Forschungsartikel
Organisational unit
ISSN
Series or journal
Sage Open
Periodical volume
12
Periodical issue
2
Peer-reviewed
✅
Part of the university bibliography
✅
Keyword
Aesthetics
Evaluation
Perception
Conceptual structure
Material
Expertise
Psychology of design
Abstract
The present study’s aim was to examine whether interindividual differences in levels of expertise influence the aesthetic processing of materials. In particular, we elucidated experts’ conceptual structure of the aesthetics of different materials using a free list task and compared it to recent non-expert data. To this end, we asked 401 architects, designers, and interior designers to list adjectives that could be used to describe the aesthetics of materials. The experts listed a large number of sensorial as well as aesthetically evaluative terms. As measured in a supplementary study, a slight majority of the listed terms had a neutral valence, followed by a large proportion of positive terms. The term beautiful, frequently the preeminent term in aesthetics, was by no means one of the most relevant terms in both studies. The results suggest that the conceptual structure of the aesthetics of materials is multifaceted and expressive, and, to some extent, influenced by expertise. Furthermore, the findings indicate that concepts underlying materials aesthetics differ from other domains.
Version
Published version
Access right on openHSU
Metadata only access